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The Papers of John Pererin 


by 

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- A Modem Mystic v 

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THE MURRAY PRESS 

176 Newbury St. 
BOSTON, MASS. 


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Copyright, 1923, by 

UNIVERSALIST PUBLISHING HOUSE 


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PUBLISHER'S FOREWORD 


This little volume is a Binet test of spiritual in¬ 
telligence. “I can’t see anything in him,” was the 
honest admission of a big business man, after hearing 
a great preacher. Only a small edition of this book will 
be published because it is taken for granted that there 
are not many people who will see anything in it. 

But for those who realize that the slavery of our 
modern life lies in our bondage to things, that our 
supreme need is to be taught that the spirit is more 
than the body, that the hope of the world lies in those 
souls willing to follow truth beyond far horizons, these 
pages will have meaning, guidance and abiding power. 






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PREFACE 


“The Papers of John Pererin” appeared first— 
over the space of nearly a year—in the Universalist 
Leader, They are now gathered together in permanent 
form in order that they may continue whatever ministry 
they are capable of serving. 

They are an attempt to express the modern re¬ 
ligious spirit, the spirit in which worship and freedom 
and knowledge each has its place, and which is chiefly 
a faith, a search, a hope, and an expectation, rather than 
a fixed and polarized attitude of soul. They are not 
meant to be theological, though from the nature of the 
case they can not altogether escape being so. They are 
purely the varied phases of one man’s reaction to the 
Universe, to God and to Life, in an age of religious tran¬ 
sition. 

As for the man himself, he is not of any importance so 
far as this book is concerned. For the curious it may be 
added concerning him that racially he is a complex of 
Welsh, Irish, and Huguenot strains. He preaches and 
writes a good deal—but (he fears) rather indifferently. He 
is deeply interested in mysticism and in modern science, 
that is, in the inward and outward revelation of God. 
He finds the mind of God in to-day’s literature as well 
as in ancient Scriptures; and he believes strongly in the 
essential identity and continuity of the Christian life 
under all the forms of its manifestation. These are 
some of the things he has tried to write about in this 



6 


THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 


book, and his dearest hope is that he may help to make 
articulate some of the vague and as yet formless hopes 
that are being kindled to-day in the hearts of all men 
and women of good-will, in terms not of conventional 
piety but of the modern scientific spirit. 


ON MAKING A FRESH START 

An old Puritan writer, speaking of the Dying 
Thief, says that God has given us one instance of an 
eleventh hour repentance: one, lest any man should 
despair, but only one, lest any man should presume. 
The only time about which we can surely say that 
it is neither too late nor too early to make a fresh start 
is now. This is the accepted, or, as we should say in 
our modern jargon, the psychological moment. 

Sentiment of a quite legitimate and healthy kind 
has invested the turn of the year with a peculiar fitness 
for this business of new beginnings. It has assumed 
that a milestone is a good place to stop at—to look 
back over the road that one has traveled, to recover 
one’s breath, and to brace oneself up for the next 
mile. This is a very good reading of human nature. 
For the passing of the milestone inevitably suggests 
a review of the record, a casting of accounts, a summing 
up of the log-book of the journey; and, for any soul 
still retaining a touch of sincerity, this is always a 
painful process. Indeed, a man has to acquire the 
complete anesthesia of a perfect self-complacency, 
if his record is not at this point or at that to move him 
to shame or to tears. Who lacks time to mourn, 
says the old proverb, lacks time to mend, and the 
man who is not mortified by the remembrance of 
failure, who is not shamed by the memory of ignoble 
surrenders, who is not humbled by the haunting 


8 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

recollection of stupid mistakes, of base compromises, 
of the days when he lowered his flag, when his baser 
self beat down his better and he consented—that 
man is a lost soul. I have large reason to thank God 
if I can still feel the shame and humiliation of my 
defeats and my failures, for I am still in the land of the 
living. I once heard a sermon on ‘The Gospel of the 
Second Chance,^' but it should have been “The 
Gospel of Still Another Chance.'' Most of us had our 
second chance long ago; and it is old forgotten history 
by now. We have had a good many chances since; 
and we shouldn't be here to tell the tale if at least we 
had not tried to take some of them. I do not know 
how many chances God is prepared to give. Jesus 
tells us that we should give another chance to the 
other man, up to seventy times seven; and I like to 
think that God will be not less patient with us than 
He requires us to be. But it is plain that there is a 
point of patience beyond which even His love can not 
stretch. “This year also . . . and if it bear fruit, well; 
but if not, then thou shalt cut it down." That is 
love's ultimatum, the soul's last chance. One never 
can tell, of course, when the last chance comes; per¬ 
haps it has come to-day for some of us. And the 

wise soul will take it now. 

* * 

This gospel of the new beginning is a cheering 
and encouraging doctrine, and it is good sound biology 
as well. For life is full of new beginnings; it is the 
genius of life to make fresh starts. It makes even 
of death a new birth; and the history of the race is 
punctuated with renewals, revivals, renascences of 


ON MAKING A FRESH START 


9 


many kinds. Like the Phoenix, life is forever rising 
out of its own ashes. And as it is on the large scale 
of nature and society, so it is in the soul. This is what 
the Puritan perceived and said, in a saying that I 
love—“The Perseverance of the Saints,that is, their 
continuance in a state of grace, “is an endless series 
of new beginnings.'' The spirit droops and revives; 
the will sags and then stiffens. In my youth, I used 
to go out on cross-country runs; and those of you who 
have done the same thing remember how the first 
mile or two used to punish you, and then you slacked 
off for a spell—^until you got your “second wind." 
And then you were off again. And in the race that is 
set before the spirit, there is also a blessed ‘‘second 
wind” and it comes to us not once or twice but as 
often as we need it, so long as we keep on the 
track. 

One may make a new start whensoever one wills; 
and every day that dawns is none too often to begin 
anew. Truly we may be born anew every morning, 
if we will. But it is a matter of some consequence 
whither we start. For here the goal is of more conse¬ 
quence than the starting point. Any old place will 
do to start from. “Just as I am, without one plea"— 
one may begin just there. The great matter is the 
objective we set before us; and that we must needs 
define with some care. Yet there should be no great 
difficulty in stating the point. What I want to do 
this year, and to start out doing here and now, is 
to help God to realize the utmost for His Kingdom on 
what He has invested in me. He has dowered me 
with life, health, strength; He has given mie a measure 


10 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

of capacity; He has helped me to acquire experience 
and knowledge; He has surrounded me with love and 
friendship. So many talents has He entrusted to me; 
then, with these talents let me go out and trade, the 
best I know how. I dedicate myself, all that I have, 
all that I am and hope to be, to this holy commerce; 
and from now on, I mean to put into it all my life. And 
as sure as I do in all sincerity mean this and send out 
to God a hailing thought to tell Him so, then I shall 
have an answering signal in my heart, a renewed im¬ 
pulse, a fresh accession of strength, reinforcement of 
mind and will. So I shall swing out toward the next 
milestone in good heart, light of foot and strong in 
hope. 

0 Thou God of New Beginnings, grant to Thy 
children a new hope and a new strength at this time. 
We suffer from the burden and the heat of the day; often 
we become wearied and fall by the way. And amid ike 
disappointments and sorrows of life, our hearts grow 
faint. Touch us with Thy Hand of Grace, so that, 
with the young year, our youth may be renewed like the 
eagle’s. Amen, 


THE INNOVATOR 


The Scriptures open with the drama of creation^ 
the spectacle of God making a new thing. They end 
with this word of self-revelation: Behold, I make all 
things new. The God whom we worship is a God of 
making and remaking, of innovation and renovation. 
This is His peculiar character; it is His genius to create 
and recreate. The frequency with which the word 
‘'new’^ appears in the New Testament is notable— 
new commandment, new creature, new covenant, new 
song, new Jerusalem, new heavens and a new earth. 
It is a great panorama of things new and things re¬ 
newed. The Providence of God is an endless process 
of construction and reconstruction. 

It is this message that the turn of the year should 
bring us. We have passed through a fiery furnace; 
and our souls are scarred and seared. We have seen 
a civilization crumbling down in ruin and sorrow be¬ 
fore our eyes; and we have realized that, beneath the 
outer crust of prosperity and relative ease, the very 
foundation of our common life was rotten and under¬ 
mined. 

And while the war was still on, we confidently 
descried through the smoke and the tumult a fairer, 
juster, kindlier world. But the war is over; and that 
new world has not arrived—and it looks as far away 
as ever. 

We are living in a foohs paradise if we suppose 



12 


THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 


that this new world will come of itself, drop down 
upon us ready-made from the clouds. It is true that 
in the Apocalypse the new Jerusalem comes down out 
of heaven from God; but it comes down to a place 
prepared for it. There will be new heavens only as 
there is a new earth; and the new earth will have to 
be made—made by you and me, by our toil and tears, 
mayhap in blood and sorrow. Its foundations must 
be laid in our sacrifice, its walls raised by our devotion 
and cemented by our patience. And we shall have 
just as much of a new world as we make up our minds 
to get and are prepared to pay the price for. For the 
world, new or old, is, after all, just ourselves. It is the 
most foolish thing in the world to suppose that we can 
go on living in the old way, working on the old ac¬ 
ceptances in commerce and industry and other human 
relationships, still governing our conduct by the tra¬ 
ditions of a day that is dead—and that the walls of a 
new world will go up all the same. There will be no 
new world at all except it be a world of new men and 
new women. 

And so before any other word can be spoken, 
let this word be said: Look to yourselves. It is one 
of our pathetic weaknesses to have an unbounded faith 
in the efficacy of impersonal things, like institutions 
and movements and abstract ideas of all sorts. I 
lately read a book which told me on every page what 
the Church did, could do, would do, and repeated 
these things to the point of weariness, as though the 
Church were a sort of super-personal power capable 
of countervailing human vagaries and of carrying 
through a program in spite of all our delinquencies and 


THE INNOVATOR 


13' 


derelictions. In modern times we have had the same 
kind of feeling about the State. The State, we say, 
should do this, or do that; and at the present moment, 
we are expecting the State to be up and doing about 
this business of reconstruction. But we are the State; 
and there is no other State than that which is so consti¬ 
tuted, made up of men and women. The State will 
be and do just what we mean it to be and do, just 
that and no more. 

And—^in the same spirit and with the same blind¬ 
ness—we hail movements of various kinds as containing 
the sure key of salvation. We set a movement afoot; 
and lo (we say), the Kingdom of God is at hand! But 
it isn't. I am not saying that movements do not em¬ 
body genuine human impulses and legitimate human 
aims—they do; but their story is that after a time* 
they lose the warm human enthusiasm of their beget¬ 
ters, and become things of offices and bureaus and 
card-indexes; and in their arteries instead of red 
blood is black ink. There are scores of dead move¬ 
ments, movements that have ceased to move, cum¬ 
bering the earth to-day. I am not sure that it 
would not be wise to create a national high day for 
quick and effectual interment. The air would at once 
become perceptibly clearer. Anyway, the value of' 
any movement depends upon the amount of warm 
human quality that it possesses, upon how much of' 
the very stuff of their life men and women put into it^, 
not upon its list of presidents or the volume of sub¬ 
scriptions, for these may be but empty forms and an easy 
substitute for personal service, the only thing that really 
matters. It will do none of us any harm to cultivate* 


14 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

a healthy scepticism concerning the validity of mere 
mass-action—whether by Church or State or any move¬ 
ment. Not indeed that there is no value in common 
human action, in living co-operation; but that is a 
different thing. Pronouncements by the Church, 
enactments by the State, the fine declarations of this 
movement or that, are mere windy rhetoric unless 
they are validated by the personal surrender and the 
patient active labor of the men and women in whose 
name the word is spoken. It is men and women that 
count, their quality, their character, their energy, their 
sacrifice. And the new world must be conceived in 
terms of personality, dedicated to the ends of per¬ 
sonality, and the labor which creates it must be 
the personal labor of common folk like you and me. 

So then, let us look to ourselves. I do not know 
whether you, my reader, feel the lure of this splendid 
adventure. Have the sorrow and anguish of these 
past years bitten so deeply into your souls that you 
feel that you can give what God leaves you yet of 
life to nothing but to the toil of making a world which 
can not again be turned into a hell? Or have you 
perchance seen a vision of the city of God, its white 
towers gleaming in the gold of a distant dawn, and the 
streets thereof full of children playing —a vision which 
has captured your heart so that you have said, I am 
no longer my own; I belong to that? Have you felt 
the pull of this thing? God grant there be among us 
no poor souls who would go back to the old easy life 
on a sleeping volcano, asking no more than to play 
the old game on the market place, to follow the old 
roimd of huckstering and stealing a march on the other 


THE INNOVATOR 


15 


fellow, feeling nothing still but the squalid and vulgar 
pull of the dollar. This hour has neither need nor 
room for the mean-spirited and the base and the 
selfish; it is the day of the high-minded and the great¬ 
hearted, of the freeman and the seer—a day not for 
mannikins but for men. And we have all been manni¬ 
kins, living little lives in a little way, seeing small 
things and doing them; but to-day the world is calling 
aloud for the broad sweep of great vision, for incon¬ 
ceivable courage in thought and action, not for the 
peddling policies of ward politicians, or the timid 
gestures of statesmen who would be idealists but are 
not. The vultures are already hovering over the 
carcass of Europe: the chauvinist and the jingo are 
busy at their old game—all the old polite diabolical 
camouflage for the game of grab. And there are also 
forces of life afoot which threaten to become forces of 
death if they are not guided into channels of construc¬ 
tive action. There are promises turning into menaces, 
resurgent life becoming insurgent—making for insur¬ 
rection where there should be splendid resurrection; 
and it is only great wisdom and great courage that 
can save the day. This is the wild heaving world 
into which we have come. Are we big enough for it? 
Wise enough? Good enough? Brave enough to 
stand in this tremendous hour? 

And the answer simply is that we are not. Yet 
it is we who have to face this thing, to become the proph¬ 
ets of a new order of life, to become the builders of 
the future. And if we have any doubts about our 
capacity, let us remember God. We do not go into this 
warfare at our own charges; for it is essentially His 


16 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

campaign. To-day, at the watershed of the ages, 
with a world seething in the melting pot, this word 
comes down to us with a certain terrible directness, 
with a challenge that is not to be evaded: 
*'Beholdy I make all things new.” Does it come with 
a personal meaning to you and me? For God will 
not, nay He can not, make all things new in spite of 
us or without us. He will just let us have' the things we 
want or deserve to have. It is so ordained in His plan 
that we must work with Him; and with Him there is 
no limit to what we can do but the limits of His own 
power. This surely is the peculiar privilege of this 
great time, that we may, with a more assured sense of 
reality, with a more vivid consciousness of the urgency 
of a great, hardly intelligible responsibility, than ever 
before, give ourselves to God unreservedly for any 
task, for any adventure to which His Spirit and His 
grace may in these great days be calling us. 

Grant us, 0 Lord our God, as we stand upon the 
threshold of a new year, a baptism of Thine own unchanging 
newness. Let us put on the new man, being renewed in 
mind and heart and will, so that we may look out upon 
the world with a new hope and with unwavering confi¬ 
dence that Thou wilt bring Thy purpose to pass. Make us 
sharers with Thee in the enterprise of rebuilding a ruined 
world and of turning this wilderness into a garden of God, 


THE ADVENTURE OF ABRAHAM 

Whenever I chanced to think of Abraham leaving 
Ur of the Chaldees, I always supposed that Ur was 
some outlandish little hole-and-corner place, and that 
Abraham had left it much as any man of spirit would 
leave that kind of place and fare out into the great 
world to try his fortune. But a little time ago I found 
—in a book picked up by chance in a friend^s house— 
that Ur was by no means a little backwoods township; 
and subsequently the Encyclopedia furnished me with 
the information that Ur was the New York or Boston 
or Montreal of its time—a great seaport, a city of some 
pretensions to culture, where the arts were patronized, 
a city of considerable political and industrial impor¬ 
tance, and perhaps even the wealthiest city of that 
day. It was not from a decayed village that Abraham 
went out, but from the metropolis, from the capital 
city, from the hub of the universe—which gives Abra- 
ham^s adventure a new complexion. It seems to be 
a much more modern affair than I had supposed. 

Further, in the course of my inquiry into the 
matter, I found that there was an old Jewish tradition 
that Abraham was a man of noble birth and that he 
was pre-eminent in wisdom, that is, he was something 
of a scholar. This evidently was not the case of 
a man who had been a failure in his own town going 
away to try his luck elsewhere. He apparently be¬ 
longed to the upper circles of Ur; and if the tradition 




18 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

be true, he ought not to have lacked any of those 
comforts and amenities which go to give a man a good 
time. Abraham’s subsequent history suggests that 
he was a man of a religious turn of mind; and even 
on that score there was much to be said for Ur. It 
was a sacred city, whither the devout brought their 
dead for burial; it was even a city of churches, for 
among its ruins is the evidence of the existence of a 
number of temples. Culture, business, wealth, re¬ 
ligion—they were all to be found in Ur. And what 
more could a man want? Yet one day, Abraham 
and his family packed up their traps and left the city 
—going out into an unfamiliar world, seeking some¬ 
thing which they themselves probably could not have 
described. 

After they had gone, the gossips in the club dis¬ 
cussed the matter. “V/ell,” they said, “Abraham was 
rather a queer fellow. There was a curious streak in 
the family, in fact. A restless dissatisfied lot, always 
reaching out for the moon.” Then some one recalled 
how, in the midst of a political discussion or a business 
conversation, Abraham v/ould become distrait and 
absent-minded, and withdraw into his shell, with a 
curious abstracted look in his eye. “Oh,” said another, 
“Abraham was always a dreamer; and you never can 
tell what those fellows will do.” Another opinion was 
that he was one of those unpractical idealists who are 
apt to turn up now and again. The upshot of it all 
was that they agreed that Abraham was a bit mad, 
that only a lunatic would burn his boats in that way. 
So Abraham stepped out of the life of Ur and was soon 
forgotten there; but on that same day he stepped 


THE ADVENTURE OF ABRAHAM 


19 


into the everlasting light of history. Ur itself is to-day 

a mere collection of mounds; the story of Abraham 

seems somehow to be a live issue still. 

* * 

Now, the reason why Abraham left Ur of the 
Chaldees was probably something very simple. There 
is no reason to suppose that he was driven out by 
economic stringency, by persecution, by lack of oppor¬ 
tunity; and it is unthinkable that he should have gone 
out of the mere love of adventure. All that we know of 
him suggests that he was a man of great sagacity 
and personal power, and that when he acted, he acted 
deliberately. He left Ur because Ur was not giving 
him something that he needed; his life seemed to be 
missing fire; Ur left him hungry and thirsty for some¬ 
thing—that thing without which all the wealth and 
culture of Ur was so much empty show, that one 
thing which, the desire of it once kindled, must be had 
at any cost. And this was not to be found in Ur; 
perhaps indeed Ur was preventing Abraham from find¬ 
ing it. And the sense of hunger became so intolerable 
that at length he had to burn his boats and go out in 
search of that ultimate thing without which no man 
may say that he lives. So Abraham set out on the 
great adventure of finding—what? 

What? Can you give it a name? Perhaps; 
but Abraham himself could not. The churches in Ur 
professed to tell him all about it; but somehow it did 
not seem to Abraham that the churches had anything 
very real or vital to offer him. They seemed to be 
living on their past; and the tides of life had gone by 
them. 


20 


THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 


Yet now and again there was to be heard even 
in the churches a hint of something—something that 
sounded as though it were the thing he was looking 
for. But never more than a tantalizing hint, a teasing 
^'false dawn.^^ Now it is easy to say that Abraham 
was seeking God; but what do we mean—do we in¬ 
deed mean by this anything at all that we ourselves 
can rationally describe? Have we ourselves so surely 
found this thing that we say Abraham was looking for, 
that we are entitled to speak so confidently about it? 
For my part, I prefer—for the moment, at least—to 
say that Abraham was looking for what I am looking 
for, that he went out to seek the one thing I am aware 
I want most of all; and I can only describe it as fulness 
of life. 

Let me put it in this way, very simply. I am 
only aware of my life in its relations; and the quality, 
the richness, the abundance of my life depends upon 
the range and the nature of its relations. The quality 
of my bodily life depends, for instance, upon the char¬ 
acter of its contacts with the physical world—upon 
the amount and nature of the food I eat, the clothes 
I wear, the exercise I take. In the same way, my 
mental life depends upon its relation to other minds, 
to friends, to books, to pictures, to music, and what 
not. 

Now, I may have all and more than all my body 
needs; I may have all and more than all that my 
mind needs; and I have no doubt that Abraham had 
all this in Ur of the Chaldees. But when all this need 
is provided for, there is left over something that is not 
satisfied; when I have health and strength of body. 


THE ADVENTURE OF ABRAHAM 21 

when my mind has all the riches of culture, intellec¬ 
tual and esthetic—yet through it all there is a crying 
voice, some unsatisfied instinct, some depth unfilled. 
We have not established all the relations that we need 
for the perfection of life; we have not completed the 
contacts that bring the full reality of living. And 
there are moments when we know that all we have is 
but mere peripheral embroidery, decorative but not 
nutritive, until these last contacts are made that fill 
the central vacuum of the soul. 

Now of the truth of this, we are all aware. Even 
in the busiest lives there are moments of quiet when 
we become conscious of this unfilled emptiness. Some¬ 
times it takes the form of a numb unhappiness, a de¬ 
pression of spirit of which we can give no satisfying 
account, a formless longing, a malaise, a nostalgia for 
some unidentified home. But we are also aware that 
the contacts, the relations by which this unrealized 
life is fulfilled, are of a different sort from those by 
which the body and the mind are satisfied. I know 
where to go for the things that my body needs; I 
know how to get the things that my intellectual and 
esthetic nature craves for. But for this more radical 
need—why, I do not know of myself the first thing 
about how or where to establish those relations upon 
which its satisfaction depends. All I know is that it is 
not in any world that I have experience of, and I go 
out rather blindly into the unknown seeking what I 
know not. And that was how Abraham went out of 
Ur—going, as the writer of Hebrews says, not know¬ 
ing whither he went, looking for something he did 
not know. All he knew was that he had failed to find 


22 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

it in Ur—v»dth all its wealth, its commerce, its culture, 

and that he must go somewhere else to look for it. 

* * 

But does that mean that we have to leave the 
old home town in order to find this thing? Perhaps 
som^e of us may. Mr. Ralph Adams Cram insists— 
in a series of books—that the very salvation of the 
world depends upon comipanies of us leaving New York 
and Boston and others of these wens of civilization 
and going out to live lives of simplicity and devoutness 
in somxe desert place apart. There is no doubt that 
the mxonastic ideal has played a great and—in its early 
stages—a fruitful part in human affairs; but I confess 
to an inability to see how we can save civilization by 
quitting it. We might perchance save our own souls 
alive; but even that I doubt. This retiring from the 
v/orld seems to me to be a form of pessimism whicli is 
atheism. Nevertheless, the complications of life in 
the gi'eat miodern city do not give much chance to the 
soul to find itself. Sometimes a young fellow who has 
gone wrong is sent to some new place to make a fresh 
start; and there is sound psychology in this. The 
breach with old associations at least makes a new 
start more possible, even if it does not make it sure. 
But merely to change one^s place does not constitute 
a new start; and leaving Boston does not ensure the 
finding of one's soul. Yet the very stress of business, 
the countless entanglements of the day's work, the 
ceaseless preoccupation with affairs, the care of prop¬ 
erty—all this may leave one with neither the leisure 
nor the inclination to seek out those things that be¬ 
long to our peace. Perhaps that was the trouble at Ur. 


THE ADVENTURE OF ABRAHAM 


23 


In Ur Abraham foimd himself to be too busy to attend 
to the crying affairs of his soul; and he had to leave it 
all—his prosperous business, his fine house, his social 
connections, his worthy philanthropies—in order to 
find himself and to find the needed provender for his 
hungry soul. Perhaps some of us may have to do 
likewise; yes, and when the hunger of the soul has gone 
past the point of endurance, some of us surely will— 
at least awhile. 

And yet this first and last thing of life is not to be 
found in any place. ^‘The depth said. It is not in me: 
and the sea saith. It is not with me.'^ So said the writer 
of Job. This secret lies along a road that is to be found 
on no map—it is a path which even the vulture's eye 
hath not seen. And it was not because he had ex¬ 
changed Ur for Haran that Abraham found something 
of what he was seeking. That may have helped; but 
Abraham'made his great discovery by changing the 
direction of his search. He had been looking outward, 
the new light came to him because he turned and looked 
inward. And for all of us this business of quitting Ur 
is a movement of the mind. Mark well, it is prob¬ 
ably true that we can not take this inward road with¬ 
out disburdening ourselves of a good deal of baggage; 
and it is not a journey one can take at odd moments 
when the pressure of the outer world and the noise 
of the marketplace let up awhile. It can not be ac¬ 
complished by spiritual ‘"week-ends" out of town. 
We have to make a steady business of it and attend 
to it with the punctuality, the concentration, the pa¬ 
tience, which we give to our temporal affairs. And I 
am persuaded that few of us can go out on this ad- 


24 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

venture without—as the first thing—a real simplifica¬ 
tion of life. We are carrying an overweight of im¬ 
pedimenta; we are all too busy, too involved, too en¬ 
tangled with a multitude of things, and things often 
enough entirely good in themselves and only evil be¬ 
cause they are so many. And I am prepared to say— 
with the utmost confidence—that if any of us will un¬ 
load enough of the cargo of business that we are carry¬ 
ing so as to be able to give a single complete hour in 
the day, and to spend that hour upon this inward travel 
with the same concentration and diligence as that 
with which we pursue the paths of business and of 
social obligation, we shall soon be discovering some¬ 
thing of what Abraham in his day discovered. 

For observe, Abraham did find something. In 
the Genesis story, you have only a bare record of the 
removal from Ur to Haran; but the story goes on then 
—as though it were something quite familiar and or¬ 
dinary—“Now the Lord said to Abraham.'^ By this 
time, Abraham was plainly on speaking terms with God. 
He had gone out into the unlaiow seeking what he 
knew not. All he knew was a need; and he went forth 
not knowing whether there was anything to meet it. 
And that is how it is with all of us. When a man is 
lost in a wood, he does not wait to be sure there is 
some one there before he cries out. He cries out in 
order to discover whether there be somebody there. 
And such is our spiritual search. We go out with a 
cry—crying in the night and with no language but a 
cry. And if we but cry long enough, there is always 
an answering signal. 

Now, when you and I begin this search, turning 


THE ADVENTURE OF ABRAHAM 


25 


our eyes inward, we meet at first nothing but darkness 
and silence. We pray—into empty space; we cry— 
out into the void. At least that is how it seems. But 
it seems so only because our eyes and ears are un¬ 
familiar with this new secret world. We are accus¬ 
tomed to images, to measurements of time and space, 
to concrete tangible visible things; but here you have 
no such helps, and it is not all at once that you come 
to be at home in this region. But you have only to 
persist; and presently faint gleams begin to pierce the 
darkness; and unfamiliar sounds rise out of the silence. 
And slowly it dawns upon you that beyond that dark¬ 
ness and silence there is Some One who understands. 
Some One hailing you, and whose signals carry with 
them to you a new sense of yourself. 

For this is the thing that has happened to you. 
I spoke of the various levels at which we establish 
contacts and come into relation with those things that 
fill our lives; I spoke mainly of two, and suggested a 
third. And when out of that unknown world which 
you have been exploring come these signals to you, 
you have entered into that relation to the deepest 
level of all—into a relation with the Unseen, the In¬ 
finite. For the rest, your life is still bounded by time 
and space; you dwell among concrete and corporeal 
things. But now you have sent out a life line that 
has anchored itself and you In the Eternal; you have 
established communications with Ultimate Reality; 
and you are on the way to become the whole man you 
were meant to be. 

Let us then start on the great quest—taking, 
making, time to seek God, to knock until a door be 


26 


THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 


opened to us, to make a grave momentous matter of 
our praying—resolute to jettison those encumbrances 
and distractions which hinder the search, to quit those 
preoccupations that blind the eye and dull the ear 
to the sights and the sounds of God^s hinterland—to 
go forth gaily into the inner dark knowing that for us 
as for Abraham it will be transmuted into the Light of 
the Perfect Life. 


THE SIN OF NOT MAKING UP ONE’S MIND 

There is one dramatic moment in the story of 
Elijah which for some reason or another Mendels¬ 
sohn omitted from the text of his oratorio. It is 
when Elijah confronts the people of Israel assembled 
on Mount Carmel with the great challenge, ^^How long 
shall ye halt between two opinions?” 

It is a far cry back to those days; and it is not 
easy for us to appreciate the size of the issue that was 
involved. On the face of it, it looks to be a little con¬ 
troversy between rival local deities—for nowadays we 
know that the Jehovah of the Hebrew tradition at 
this point of time was a very different deity from that 
which we worship. But there was nevertheless a very 
momentous issue at stake. It was the question of a 
choice between a God who would permit and perhaps 
justify the kind of life they wanted to lead, who would 
cast a complaisant eye upon a habit of easy morals, 
and a God who would require a stern and steady self- 
discipline. It was the choice between a God who 
could be trusted to ask very little of his worshipers, 
and a God who was likely to ask a great deal and 
might even exact everything, the choice between a 
cheap and pleasant religion and a religion of great 
ideals and therefore of great dem.ands. So that really 
it was not a choice between two Gods, but a great moral 
decision about life. If they made up their minds for 
Baal, it was because they preferred the life of natural 


'28 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

and fleshly desire, and they would take a God made 
upon their own image. That was the one way. The 
other way was the way of self-discipline, of that good 
that they had learned to call Righteousness, in which 
case they would take Jehovah for their God. What 
was really facing them was not so much a choice of 
Gods, but a decision about themselves. 

And it is everlastingly true that your belief about 
God is plainly registered in the kind of life you choose 
to live. It is not the things you say about God, but 
the things you do with yourself, that tell what you 
believe about Him. There are plenty of people who 
hold the opinion that God exists, but who go on living 
as though there were no God at all, who order their 
lives without giving a thought to God. And that is 
the one real and deadly atheism. Dr. L. P. Jacks 
tells the story of an old cobbler in an English village 
who professed to be an atheist, but who was very care¬ 
ful to see that no poor child went unshod in the winter. 
When he died, one of his friends said about him, ‘'He 
Talked more than a man of his size should have done. 
He spent his breath in proving that God did not ex¬ 
ist, and spent his life in proving that He did.” 

That gives you the other side of the shield. A 
man’s opinions are not his beliefs. His opinions are 
■what he talks about; his beliefs are what he acts 
.upon. 

So that your real mind about God comes out in 
what you do with your life. I imagine that the truth 
about most people nowadays is that they neither be¬ 
lieve nor disbelieve in God. They neither affirm nor 
.deny; they simply drift. It is not true to say that 


THE SIN OF NOT MAKING UP ONE’S MIND 29 - 

they are halting between two opinions, for they are 
not aware of two opinions; they are not limping be- 
tween two sides, they are not conscious of an opposi¬ 
tion of sides. They just go on from day to day, living 
from hand to mouth, eating their meals when the time 
comes, sleeping, waking, working in a sort of mechan¬ 
ical round, and picking up what diversion they can 
on the way without asking too many questions. So 
far as they have any coherent philosophy of life at all 
it is the philosophy of having as good a time as pos¬ 
sible, without any troublesome ideas about the duty 
of doing good or any strong aversion from doing eviL 
It is a colorless, characterless life which counts for 
nothing in the great movement of the world. 

You will remember that in the beginning of 
Dante's Inferno he says that when he was approaching 
the purlieus of Hell, his ears were assailed by a battery 
of despairing howls, of hopeless weeping. And when 
he saw the unfortunates from whom the clam.or came, 
he inquired about them and was told that they were 
the people who had never miade up their minds, who 
were neither for God nor against Him, and whom even 
Hell would not receive. For there is no room in Hell 
for colorless nobodies. Kipling has a similar idea 
in his poem, Tomlinson, in which he describes a man 
who had commxitted no sins of his own but had been 
a weak imitator of other men's sins. There is a sin 
which is not worth damning—the sin of being next to 
nothing at all. 

And if you think that it is an exaggeration to 
call this sin —then read this passage from George Adam 
Smiith's exposition of the prophet Zephaniah. The- 


30 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

prophet is speaking of the indifferent colorless people 
in Jerusalem who were saying in their hearts/'Jehovah 
does no good; and he does no evil.” "We have to-day 
the same mass of obscure, nameless persons, who op¬ 
pose their almost unconquerable inertia to eveiy move¬ 
ment of reform, and are the drag upon all vital and 
progressive religion. The great causes of God and 
Humanity are not defeated by the hot assaults of the 
Devil, but by the slow, crushing, glacier-like mass of 
thousands and thousands of indifferent nobodies. 
God’s causes are never destroyed by being blown up, 
but by being sat upon.” That is the sin of being a 
man who drifts. 

There is but one way out of this slough of indif¬ 
ference, this life that cancels out, leaving as the re¬ 
sult nothing. Read the lives of any of the men who 
have mattered in the world, and you will find back of 
all their achievement a moment at which they made a 
great and decisive moral surrender—to an ideal, to a 
vision, to a cause. They took sides; they planted 
themselves down squarely as the friends, the servants, 
the soldiers, the advocates of some enterprise of faith 
and love; they wore its badge, they carried its banner; 
they gave all they were to it. It is this quality of 
decisive moral sun'ender that gives meaning and nobil¬ 
ity and greatness to life, this focusing of all the powers 
of life upon a single purpose. 

For us the real issue of life is simplified so that 
we can not mistake it. It is expressed in a single 
name—Jesus. We have accepted him as the embod¬ 
iment of what a human life should be. Jesus is God’s 
last word to us about ourselves. He defines for us the 


THE SIN OF NOT MAKING UP ONE'S MIND 31 

meaning and the point of life. It is not given to all 
of ns, indeed it is given but to few of us, to become the 
flaming protagonists and leaders of great causes. We 
have not been planned on a large enough scale. But 
that does not mean that we have no opening for that 
decisive moral surrender which adds greatness even to 
small men like^ ourselves. For there is always a 
great cause calling us, and it is the great cauie that 
makes the great soul. And here waiting is that Cause 
which is Christ, that ideal which is Christ, that vision 
which is Christ, the purpose which is the Kingdom of 
Christ on earth. It is the Cause of God no less than 
of man, the Cause which embraces all causes, the ideal 
which gathers into itself all ideals, the vision of which 
every other vision is a broken light. It is the supreme 
cause of humanity in time and in eternity. And you 
swing into it by your personal surrender to Jesus 
Christ. 

Thou God and Father of all, in whose will is our 
peace, reveal unto us continually what is Thy good and 
perfect will. Deliver us, we entreat Thee, from aim- 
lessness; keep us from the easy complacency that passes 
from day to day without purpose or plan. Show us 
Thy Will that we may do it; reveal to us Thy Kingdom 
that we may serve it; manifest to us the Christ that toe 
may surrender ourselves to him. Amen, 





FATHER WORKETH HITHERTO^^ 


When Jesus spoke these words, he uttered two 
heresies in the same breath. The chief heresy was, as 
the Pharisees said, that he made himself equal with 
God. The other was a denial of the old idea that when 
God had finished the work of the sixth day He there¬ 
after rested from anything that might properly be 
called work. Jesus dismisses the old tradition very 
summarily, and says that God is still at work, that He 
has not finished working, and that He does not even 
stop working on the Sabbath day. All of which was 
very shocking to the Pharisees, but should be very 
comforting to us. 

We hear a good deal from time to time about 'The 
problem of evil;” and it is useless to obscure from 
ourselves that the existence of sin and pain and 
suffering in the world is a real stumbling block in the 
way of faith. But the harshness of this difficulty 
arises chiefly out of our habit of thinking of God in 
terms of the philosophical Absolute. When we think of 
God as all-powerful, all knowing, and as possessing 
all His attributes in an absolute form., the natural 
inference is that everything that He does must be 
perfect as it leaves His hands. If God is absolute in 
His perfections, then obviously He can not do any¬ 
thing that is not perfect; He can not, as it were, hand 
down any unfinished work. And yet the thing that 
confronts any honest observer of the world is that it 


34 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

is an imperfect and therefore an unfinished world. 
There must therefore be something wrong with this 
method of conceiving of God. And it is because it 
helps me to conceive of God in a way which affords 
me an escape from this dilemma that I find comfort 
in this word of Jesus. 

For it brings me a conception of a working God, 
of a God, that is, who has not yet finished His work. 
Now if I can believe that this is an unfinished world 
and that God is still at work upon it, then, though I 
can not find a full explanation of the contradictions, 
I do find some relief from the pressure of this particular 
doubt. If you went into an artist’s studio and saw a 
picture on his easel, you might say to yourself, “That 
is a queer picture. It seems to make no sense at all. 
The artist must be mad.” But if the artist were to 
come into the studio and, without observing you, were 
to take up his brush and begin to work on that picture 
you would at once discover that you had spoken too 
fast. You had been judging the man from an unfin¬ 
ished picture, and you are in no position to judge the 
art or the artist until you are looking at a finished 
creation. 

And that is how it is with this world. It is 
an unfinished creation. The litter, the broken pieces 
that you see lying about, the rough edges, the general 
appearance of untidiness and confusion, all this is 
simply the sign of an unfinished creation, a creation 
which is in process of being perfected. Go into a 
sculptor’s studio while he is busy upon some big work, 
and that studio will show you in miniature what you 
see about you on a large scale in the world. The 


“MY FATHER WORKETH HITHERTO” 35 

Divine Craftsman is still at work. When Darwin 
announced the theory of evolution it was supposed 
that he had disposed forever of the idea of divine 
creation. But to-day we are beginning to see that 
evolution was the method of creation. And Bergson 
has elaborated this view in what is hitherto his most 
important book—which he called by the suggestive 
title Creative Evolution. Creative Evolution speaks 
of a God who is still at work, and who is bringing His 
handiwork to perfection. 

But this is not all. Not only is God's handiwork 
unfinished, it has been all muddled and confused by 
the day-laborers and the journeymen on the job. 
Not only is this an unfinished world, but it is a world 
that has grievously miscarried. When God laid the 
foundations and constructed the framework of this 
world He meant it to be a home for men whom He 
made in His own image. And He intended that these 
men should work with Him in perfecting this home 
and making it a good place to live in. And instead of 
getting on the job they began to obstruct it. They 
thought that they would have a better time if they 
went off ''on their own." They went on strike. They 
fell to quarreling with one another, and they used the 
building material to throw at each other. They started 
all sorts of sabotage, they threw monkey wrenches into 
the machinery. And the whole undertaking went 
wrong. The workers did everything that workers 
should not have done; and they were not Bolsheviki 
or I. W. W.'s either, but—well, just you and me. 
When we go off at the instance of our selfishness to 
grind our own axes, to play for our own hand, we are 


36 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

• ♦> 

just obstructing the great task of the ages, we are 
spoiling the handiwork of God and thwarting His 
purpose of good for mankind. We are the worst kind 
of saboteurs, the grand shirkers and wobblers of the 
universe. And the case is so serious that as far back 
as we have any knowledge God has been doing little 
but trying to get us back into our senses and back on 
to the job. And in the fulness of the time he sent 
His Son into the world in order to win us back to our 
appointed destiny of fellow-workers with Him, to go 
right back to the glorious and wonderful task of 
making this world safe for—our children. 

Thou Master of all good workmen, we have been 
worse than unprofitable to Thee, for we have not even 
done that which was our duty to do. Forgive us that we 
have so often opposed’our selfishness to Thy will, that 
we have caused Thy Purpose to miscarry through our 
slackness and pride. Yet Thou hast sought to win us 
back to‘ our place by Thy side, and the remembrance of 
Thy Patience moves us to shamef Lord our God, redeem 
us yet from our folly, and make us proud and glad of 
any task however small in the building of Thy City. 


THE THANKFUL FOREIGNER 

*'And he was a Samaritan/' And nobody expected 
good manners from a Samaritan. Certainly no Jew 
did. The Samaritan was the scum of the earth, the off- 
scouring of mankind, and he was incapable of decent 
human feeling, that at least was the Jewish view. 
And now this solitary Samaritan turns up again and 
shows himself to have been the only gentleman in the 
company. 

You observe that among lepers there was seem¬ 
ingly no distinction oi race. ‘"Adversity," says Shakes¬ 
peare, “makes strange bed-fellows." A common mis¬ 
fortune irons out all distinctions. We saw how during 
the war community of suffering stilled the strife of 
classes. When calamity overwhelms us, it strips us 
bare to the buff; and nothing is left but our common 
human stuff. 

Yet when the cloud passes, the old distinctions 
lift their head once more. When the leprosy disap¬ 
peared, the old racial difference reappeared. Jew and 
Samaritan fell apart once more. And yet it was the 
old indifference—with a difference. For the Samaritan 
dog showed up a gentleman. The superior Jew behaved 
like a cad. 

It makes all the difference in the world to your 
reaction to good fortune whether you are a snob or 
a man. If you are a snob at heart, good fortune 
only aggravates your snobbishness; but if you are a 



38 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

real man, it brings out the true quality of your man¬ 
hood. 

* * 

And we are like those Jews. God has been good 
to us beyond our deserving; and our very prosperity 
has hidden God from us. Twenty-five hundred years 
ago an old writer wrote a warning which prefigures 
what has happened to us: '‘Beware that thou forget 
not the Lord Thy God. . . . lest when thou hast 
eaten and art full and hast built goodly houses and 
hast dwelt therein, and when thy herds and thy flocks 
multiply and thy silver and thy gold is multiplied and 
all that thou hast is multiplied, then thine heart be 
lifted up and thou forget the Lord Thy God . . . and 
thou say in thy heart. My power and the might of 
mine hand hath gotten me this wealth.'' This is a 
“moving picture" of our generation. 

It is the peculiar paradox of this modem temper 
that it is the very abundance and steadiness of God's 
gifts which have made us unmindful of Him. For, as 
the same old writer says, “It is He that giveth thee 
power to get wealth;" even the power which has made 
some of us criminally wealthy is His gift—though 
that is the abuse and not the use of it. What you and I 
forget is how much we owe to others; how little of 
our best achievements we owe to ourselves. I re¬ 
member once traveling on a fast train from Cambridge 
to London with an old minister; and when we reached 
the terminus and were leaving the station, he turned 
aside to the engine driver as we passed the engine and 
said to him, “Thank you for a safe journey;" and then 
he turned to me and said, “I always do that." It was 


THE THANKFUL FOREIGNER 


39 


one of those little incidents which seem to open the 
door into an unsuspected room in one's mind, full of 
strange neglected unthought-of things; and it has 
helped me to realize how much I owe to the faithful¬ 
ness, the diligence, the toil, of countless multitudes of 
people whose names I do not know and whose faces I 
have not seen. You remember the old gibe—‘'So 
and so is a self-made man." “Yes, and he worships 
his maker." We know that he is apt to do so; but he 
is worshiping the least thing about him, a thing so 
small as to be barely perceptible. There are no self- 
made men; we are made by each other; we are all 
synthetic products. The factory of life is worked 
chiefly on a basis of unconscious co-operation. No 
millionaire ever made his own millions; other men 
made them for him. I owe my very self to something 
that happened before I was born. The Almighty God 
made me and you with only two independent endow¬ 
ments—an empty place for the reception of gifts, 
and a certain power and range of choice. At 
last the main difference between men is a dif¬ 
ference in their faculty of receptiveness; for the 
choices they make and the things they achieve are 
governed by the free gifts they have received from 
God and man. The margin of credit due to us for 
any good or great thing we do is so small as to be in¬ 
visible; it belongs to all those who have made us what 
we are—our ancestors, our parents, our teachers, our 
friends, and a great multitude of others known, but 
chiefly unknown, with whom our lives are connected 
by numberless invisible links. Every one of us is a 
ganglion in a nervous system as wide as the world and 




40 


THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 


as long as eternity. Paul cried, '‘I am debtor to the 
Jew, I am debtor to the Greek but the circle of our 
indebtedness is infinitely extended, God alone knows 
where its circumference lies. Take the one single fact 
that next Sunday you may worship God in a church 
of your own choice. A little thing it seems; and yet it 
is a thing for which the list of your creditors includes a 
party of English wanderers who three hundred years 
ago set foot on the wintry shore of New England, and 
a German named Martin Luther, and an old Norman 
baron named Simon de Montfort who compelled King 
John to put his name to a document seven hundred 
years ago in a little island in the Thames . . . and 
there was a cross on Calvary. We are rightly proud 
of our religious liberty; but with a great price was 
this freedom purchased; and before we are proud, it 
is simple good manners to be thankful. And so it is 
with everything else. 

And back of everything is God, the unceasing 
giver of good gifts, God whose very genius it is to be 
always giving, and from whom, as the apostle James 
roundly says, ‘'comes down every good gift and every 
perfect gift.'' There are the gifts He has mediated 
through others, and those that have come to us straight 
from His hand; the gifts of providence and the gifts 
of grace; and without these gifts, our life could not 
last one hour. “We are," says St. Paul, “his handi¬ 
work," and both by the agents of His grace and by His 
own right arm. He has made us—and He alone. I 
challenge you to look into your heart and discover one 
thing there which you prize which is not a gift—direct 
or indirect—from God. 


THE THANKFUL FOREIGNER 


41 


*^His love fills infinitude wholly; nor leaves up nor down 

One spot for the creature to stand on.” 

Ingratitude in any region of life is bad manners; 
and to forget the thanks we owe to God is to fail in 
ordinary decency of conduct. Our honor is deeply 
compromised by it; it is a kind of spiritual treason 
within the family. And remember that the returning 
of thanks is not a formal gestime, a thing of bowings 
and flatteries. Mr. Chesterton in his very remarkable 
‘‘Short History of England^^ makes the profound re¬ 
mark that “thanks are the highest form of thought/^ 
by which I think he means that it is the supreme 
achievement of the intellect to recall the infinite range 
and variety of the gifts of God, to be sensible of all 
their intricacies and involutions, to perceive the endless 
continuity of their descent and their distribution, and 
to be able to gather all this volume of obligation into 
a single emotion and lift it up in a single thought to 
God. 

Few of us can do it; but there are none of us 
who can not try. And it is part of the merciful wisdom 
of God that He takes the will and the failure for the 
deed. 

Giver of every good and every 'perfect gift, overlook 
<mr ingratitude. Quicken 'within us a sense of the 
abundance of Thy bounty toward us; bring to our re- 
me'tnbrance all that Thou hast done for us. Move 
us to shame that we so easily, so lightly, forget Thee; 
and save us from the tragic foolishness of supposing that 
we can do without Thee. Stir us to gratitude, and to that 
lowliness of heart which is always sensitive to Thy 
presence. 


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ON REDEEMING GOODNESS FROM DULNESS 

I 

“Except your righteousness exceed the righteous¬ 
ness of the Scribes and Pharisees. . . ” 

The good life should be the greatest of all adven¬ 
tures; but the popular idea of the good man is that he 
is a tame rabbit. There is something to be said for the 
popular view. Few of us who openly profess ourselves, 
to be Christians give any vivid impression that we are 
out on the most romantic and thrilling enterprise in 
the world. We are, looked at from the outside, as dull 
and uninteresting as a flock of sheep; and we very 
badly need to be redeemed from this dulness. 

I do not mean by this that we are to go out of our 
way to seek singularity, or to make ourselves unusual 
or peculiar, in order to advertise our wares. People 
who do that generally end by making themselves 
ridiculous. What I mean is that we are not living out 
the Christian program in such a way as to throw it 
up before the eye of the common man as the tremen¬ 
dous, glorious, dramatic thing that it essentially is. 
We may have the root of the matter in us, but the 
trouble is that it does not show above ground. The 
Christian undertaking should be the most attractive- 
and compelling thing in the world. The story is told 
of a man who had seen a glimpse of the wonder and 
glory of this thing so that he went and sold all that'^he. 


44 


THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 


had in order that he might possess it for himself; and 
it was this same allurement that the disciples of Jesus 
felt when they left, this one his bench and that one his 
nets, and forsook all and followed him. And we have 
to put something of this quality of allurement into 
the Christianity we profess if we are to commend 
it to this tough, imimaginative, and thick-skinned 
world. 

What is the matter with us? Precisely, I think, 
what was the matter with those Scribes and Pharisees 
whom Jesus had in mind in the saying which stands 
at the head of this paper. They had fallen into ruts 
and had come to suppose that there was no life or truth 
or wisdom outside those ruts. They had convention¬ 
alized both religion and morality, and were trying to 
force life and truth to flow through their little canals. 
And life, which is so much greater than the forms into 
which men cast their faith and the habits into which 
they fix the moral impulse, went past them; they had 
ceased to be relevant to a life that had outgrown them. 
The time had come for a larger type of moral char¬ 
acter, a more enterprising conception of goodness. 
And the whole point of this notable passage in the 
teaching of Jesus was that his disciples were to avoid 
binding the spirit of goodness in the chains of a con¬ 
ventional morality and making it a thing of rules; that 
on the contrary they were to let it go free that it may 
express itself in those spontaneous original and crea¬ 
tive ways that the infinite need and variety of man's 
life calls for. 

Now the truth about us is that we also have 
developed a sort of legalism; and goodness to us is 


ON REDEEMING GOODNESS FROM DULNESS 45= 

very much an affair of rules and prescriptions. 
There are some things that we should do and other 
things which we should abstain from doing; and 
goodness consists for us largely in walking the tight, 
rope which marks the line of orthodox conduct in the 
midst of a crooked and perverse generation. It is 
essentially a standardized affair; and because the 
standard is ever before us we tend to a uniformity of 
conduct which is as interesting as a row of pins. It 
may be admitted cheerfully that this conventional 
standard of conduct is a vast improvement in quality,, 
in sanity, and in humanity, upon the standardized 
morality of the Pharisees, yet the fact remains that 
our standard is beset by the same damning fault as 
that of the Pharisees—namely, that it is a stand¬ 
ard. 

And, as I understand the New Testament, the one 
thing that the Christian ideal of conduct must not 
have is a fixed standard. It Uiay have a direction, 
but it is not to have a definition. It may have a. 
particular line of advance, but it has no prescribed 
route to a fixed goal. That is to say, the New Testa¬ 
ment idea of this thing that we call goodness is that, 
it is an inner im.pulse that will express itself in all 
sorts of original and creative v/ays as the various 
occasions and contingencies of life may require. It is' 
not something that can be analyzed and set down in a 
printed book, first, second, third, and so forth. It is a. 
living thing that bloweth where it listeth, that is for 
ever tr>dng to outdo its own best. It is not a set of 
rules, but an independent and self-directing spirit; 
and it has a wisdom of its own that makes it equal to> 


46 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

every emergency, and a resourcefulness that enables 
it to do the right thing in every crisis that it meets. 
And we need nothing so much to-day as the eman¬ 
cipation of this spirit from the ruts into which we turn 
it and within which we limit and narrow and starve 
it, so that the goodness we display to the world may 
not be a poor negative bloodless pietism, but a mighty, 
red-blooded creative power that goes out with wealth 
of resource, with the joy of abounding life, and with 
invincibility of purpose, to those tasks of creation and 
redemption which will turn the wilderness of this world 
into the Garden of God. 

Yet, indeed, all this is only a plea that we try 
to make ourselves into larger-sized Christians. We 
are suffering from arrested development because we 
are dogged by our bondage to standards; and we need 
to break through into a larger and more spacious 
Christian practise. In this connection I recall a cer¬ 
tain salmon pool which was one of the joys of my 
childhood. At spawning time the salmon came up 
the river to the pool, but they were held there by a 
high waterfall. And it was one of the most inspiriting 
sights to see the salmon leap the fall in order to gain 
the upper reaches of the river. It is something of 
that kind that needs to happen to us. We are circu¬ 
lating round and round in the pool of a conventional 
and orthodox conduct, and neither growing in char¬ 
acter and moral impressiveness, nor commending 
the faith we profess as a great adventurous calling. 
And there must be a break through somehow into a 
larger vision of Christian living and a fresher and 
more vivid Christian practise. 


ON REDEEMING GOODNESS FROM DULNESS 47 

0 Thou who madest us free that we might serve Thee 
with a willing hearty forgive us that we weave bonds and 
bands for Thy Spirit within us. Deliver us from this 
folly of imposing a slave-habit upon ourselves; and let 
the Spirit of Goodness and Truth go free. Thou who 
art ever saying to the bound, Go forth, speak the liber¬ 
ating word to our hearts and wills to-day, so that we may 
go forth upon the adventure of a creative goodness that 
will reveal Thy glory to men. Amen. 

II 

It was not rigid uniformity of conduct alone 
that discredited the Pharisee doctrine of goodness. 
Even more was it evil and fruitless on account of its 
negative character. On the whole it was an affair 
of not doing things. They had developed a spurious 
conception of holiness which consisted chiefly in the 
preservation of a formal cleanliness. They were great 
authorities upon what was clean and what was unclean. 
They had everything sorted out and catalogued, 
and their meat and drink was to live according to the 
book. This consisted chiefly in not eating this thing, or 
not touching that fellow, or keeping away from that 
place, or abstaining from saying certain words. Now it 
would be only silly to suggest that our conception of 
conduct moves on this plane of triviality; nevertheless 
it is simple truth to say that it is far too much in com¬ 
mon practise an affair of prohibitions and abstentions. 
We have to rid ourselves of the spurious idea that 
holiness consists mainly in keeping ourselves unspotted 
from the world. That is indeed necessary; but all 


48 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

the same it looms too large in our conception of char¬ 
acter and duty. And perhaps we are concerned so 
much about it because the positive and constructive 
aspects of Christian conduct are so little prcminent 
in our minds. If they were, and we saw that goodness 
consists first of all in a program of positive action, we 
should not worry or need to worry so much about 
avoiding spots and stains. 

We have then to ask ourselves what is the positive 
action that is called for by the Christian character. 
And the answer is easy. The consistent emphasis of 
the New Testament is upon those graces and acts which 
make for human unity. A fair reading of the New 
Testament should convince you that it means one 
thing and one thing only—bringing man to God and 
his fellow man in the bonds of a free self-giving, self- 
governing love. The key-word of the New Testament 
is this word love; and we miss much of the point of the 
book and its message because the word love has been 
debased by shallow and flippant use. It is only as we 
conceive of it in the terms of Professor Pauschenbusch^s 
definition that we shall restore our own sense of its 
true meaning. It is *'no flickering or wayward emo¬ 
tion but the energy of a steadfast will bent upon 
creating fellowship.^^ The good man in the Christian 
scheme is no austere recluse, bent upon achieving a 
private and cloistered virtue, no isolated saint who 
withdraws from the warm but tangled life of his 
brethren, but the man who lives among his fellow men 
as a binder of hearts, a roadmaker, a builder of bridges 
by which souls may find one another, who, amid the 
teeming life of men, lives as a focus of unity, a spring 


ON REDEEMING GOODNESS FROM DULNESS 49 

of healing, overcoming in himseK and in other men 
the tempers and attitudes that estrange and divide, 
and gathering men into the harmony and peace of a 
holy family. This is not merely a part of Christian 
duty, one thing among others that we have to do. It 
is the whole of Christian duty. It is the one thing 
that we have to do, and we have to be doing it all the 
time, finding in business and in all the ways of life 
means and opportunities of doing it. It is the law 
and the prophets and the gospel as well. 

God knows that there is need of this kind of 
Imng to-day. There never was a time when men had 
so great a chance of becoming great adventurous 
Christians as there is here and now. Think of all the 
bad blood, the rancor, the ill-will, the resentments, 
the bitterness, the enmity, the pugnacity, there is in 
the world to-day, not in that festering sore which we 
call Europe only, but here at our very doors. We are 
engulfed in industrial unrest which is charged with a 
sullen, stubborn acrimony, and which is being met 
chiefly by bitter and stormy condemnation. All this is 
a challenge to Christian souls to take up the business 
that belongs to them of healing this torn community 
and proclaiming over against the mad and fruitless 
doctrine of fighting it out the Gospel of Reconciliation, 
to proclaim it to the Garys and the Gomperses and all 
the rest of the people who are leading us through a 
driving mist of hard names and half-truths to what 
threatens to be a dance of death. Here is the task 
and here is the challenge—are we big enough for the 
job? I venture to think that if we set about this 
task in earnest we should astonish the world, and men 



60 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

would begin to say once more that the Christians were 
turning the world upside down. 

There are two words that should be added. 
One is that the first thing that needs to be quickened 
in us is a sympathetic imagination. The late John 
Fiske says in one of his books that half the cruelty in 
the world is due to a stupid incapacity to put ourselves 
in other people’s places. Much of the bitterness that is 
casting its shadow over life to-day is due to the lack 
of this simple thing. There is consequently no kind 
of resourcefulness in our handling of the problems that 
vex us. We are clumsy and heavy-handed and awkward 
where we need all the delicacy of perception and the 
sensitiveness of touch in the world; and we are bung¬ 
ling away to disaster. An Indian prince on his first 
visit to England was dining at the home of a certain 
nobleman. At the appointed time fingerbowls were 
laid upon the table; but the visitor, unfamiliar with 
the custom, raised his fingerbowl to his lips and drank 
from it, to the great dismay of the brilliant company. 
But the host, seeing the position, gravely lifted his 
own fingerbowl and drank the water. That, you will 
say, was perfect courtesy. It was; but it was so be¬ 
cause it was accompanied with this quality of imagi¬ 
nation which not only gives understanding but also 
provides the just word and the fitting healing act at 
the needed time. And without it, how are we to thread 
a way through the desperate tangle of this present 
time? 

The other word is this. We can not act in a full 
and fruitful way until we are free from every motive, 
every bias, but that of seeking and doing the will of 


ON REDEEMING GOODNESS FROM DULNESS 51 

Christ. We have our partialities and prejudices, our 
dogmas and desires. But we must hold these subject 
to our loyalty to that same will of Christ. Partisan¬ 
ship for a view and for a class, which it is not easy to 
avoid, must give way to the plain leading of the spirit 
of Christ. Do you know the story of Lenthall, Speaker 
of the British House of Commons in the time of Charles 
I? The King came to the House one day to arrest 
five of its members. When he asked Lenthall if those 
members were present, the Speaker answered: ''Your 
Majesty will pardon me that this is the only answer 
that I can return to your Majesty. I am Speaker of 
this House; and I have neither eyes to see nor ears to 
hear save as this House shall direct me.” Professor 
Royce cites that story as the perfect example of loyalty. 
And if we could take on our lips and translate into our 
lives this resolve to have eyes to see and ears to hear 
only as Christ shall direct us, we should make men to 
see once more the glory and the wonder of the life to 
which they no less than we have been called; and good¬ 
ness would become not only interesting, but excit¬ 
ing. 

Bring us, we beseech Thee, out of the half-lights of a 
conventional goodness; save us from contentment in a 
mere average; forbid us from acquiescence in a way of 
^‘living at a poor dying rate.” Enable us, in Thy patience, 
to open wide the gateway of our spirits that the love of 
Christ may invade our lives and constrain us to venture 
out into the unredeemed regions of life with the quickening 
creating grace that alone can deliver them from waste 
and death, and that may under the dew of Thy blessing 
make the wilderness to blossom as the rose. Amen. 


THE HUMAN REVOLUTION 


“And a man shall be as an hiding place from the 
wind. . . ” 

When Daniel saw his visions in the night, you will 
remember that after the first four visions—wild night¬ 
mares they were, symbols of the brute imperialisms of 
the ancient world—he saw ^‘one like unto a son of 
man,'' that is, he just saw a man, an ordinary, typical, 
representative man. A hundred years ago, when the 
world was in much the same turmoil as it is to-day, 
that true seer WTliam Blake saw a like vision—“the 
human form divine” as he called it. His whole utter¬ 
ance, whether in word or in line and color, is a loud 
vehement cry for a man —^for a new kind, and yet the 
oldest kind of man—the plain natural unspoilt human 
spirit, divested of all the dogmatic and institutional 
half-truths that arrest his native self-expression, and 
appareled only in the simple habit of love, mercy, 
pity and truth. I confess to you that my spirit longs 
to see, and will want in hope until it does see, that real 
Man taking shape over against the dark and chaotic 
background of this present time, a Man whom we shall 
see, the Man that we all ought to be. 

Just such a man as Isaiah describes. “And a 
man shall be," says he. Any man, that is. Dick and 
Tom and Harry, or you or I. Not especially selected 
persons in the community. Isaiah means every ordi¬ 
nary man, the man in the street, the average man. 


64 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

And, he says, the Average Man shall be as an 
hiding place froni the wind, and a covert from the 
tempest, as rivers of water in a dry place, as the 
shadow of a great rock in a weary land. Just now the 
Man in the street is not a hiding place from the wind; 
he is the wind. He is not a covert from the tempest; 
he is the tempest. He is not the shadow of a great 
rock in a weary land, it is he who makes the land 
weary. And yet this isn’t quite fair. He is not 
all blast and tempest. There are streaks of kindness 
and tenderness and good fellowship in him; and there 
are times when you see nothing but these streaks— 
around Christmas, for instance. He is always ready 
at any time to help a lame dog over a stile. Yet this 
is somewhat incidental—on the side as it were. The 
average man is still at bottom a predatory animal. I 
hear business men say that what they want is less 
interference by government, they want to be left 
alone and don’t want the government poking its 
nose in everywhere. But government, in which some 
of us have a pathetic illusory trust and which others 
are bidding keep off the grass, got this power simply 
because we were not playing fair with each other in the 
past; and it had to step in to make the Average Man 
keep the rules of the game. We are burdened with 
too much government to-day because yesterday our 
individualism ran riot and had to be put in a strait- 
jacket. And are we so much better than our fathers 
that we can be trusted to play fair? I wonder—and I 
wonder because I know my own heart. After all, 
the beast of prey has not yet died out of us, if the rest 
of men are anything like me. 


THE HUMAN REVOLUTION 


55 


Government interference is indeed a poor business; 
and this machinery of restraint that we call Law is 
very irksome. But what can we put in its place? 
Of course, what we want is a revolution—and when I 
say revolution, I mean the word in its strictest sense, 
I hear a great deal about revolution nowadays; but 
that is not revolution—it is merely redistribution. 
The cards are going to be reshuffled, but it will be the 
same old soiled pack. The only revolution that 
matters is that which will give us a new pack; and then 
I donT think it will matter much how they are shuf¬ 
fled. Just now it is a shuffle between the top-dogs and 
the under-dogs; and the talk of revolution means 
simply that the under-dogs are going to try to be top- 
dogs. And the only difference I can see is that there 
will be a larger number of top-dogs. I confess I am 
not interested in that kind of revolution, for it leaves 
the moral problem where it was. The only revolution 
that I am interested in is one that will stop the top- dog 
and the under-dog being dogs, and will make them men, 
full men, which is the same as saying brothers. And all 
the isms, capitalism, socialism, conservatirm and 
radicalism, syndicalism and bolshevism, all these or¬ 
ganized partisan doctrines and interests would be 
swallowed up in the one ism that is universal and per¬ 
manent, that humanism which after all is the very 
breath of our life and, by the same token, the practise 
of the mind of Jesus Christ. 

We need neither fear nor promote any other 
revolution if we can get this revolution. It will be as 
much revolution as we can handle or the world can 
heed. If I can only get this little world oi Me and 


56 


THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 


you get your little world of You turned upside down— 
and I say me and you because we need it as much as 
any one else—we shall turn the world upside down, 
or rather right side up, before long. It is the revolution 
within that is wanted—the rest can look after itself. 

And if all we average men became like Isaiah^s 
man, what a world it would be! The whole idea is of 
a man who is a refuge, a shelter, a sanctuary, a pro¬ 
tector. Just think of a society in which I were your 
sanctuary and you were my sanctuary, and we were all 
each other's sanctuaries, when every man were every 
man's ''big brother," every man his brother's keeper. 
I was talking the other day to a man who had had 
some dealings with a real estate firm; it was quite 
evident that the man and the firm were out for scalps— 
each other's scalps; and there is an insensate amount 
of that kind of scalp-hunting about. But suppose we 
made the great discovery that our real interests were 
after all identical, and that this sort of scalp-hunting 
is just the starkest tomfoolery, why, we should step 
into a new world straight away! It is just that dis¬ 
covery we need to make—to discover that the one 
thing in life which is worth while, which is completely 
satisfying, which leaves no regrets, which charges life 
with a priceless joy, is to be the shadow of a great rock 
in a weary land. Don't you want to qualify for the 
post? Would you not rather be a man to whom other 
men come for brotherly counsel, a man with a name 
for helping lame dogs over stiles, than have all the 
wea'th of Croesus? Don't you in your heart know it is 
better to be a man to whom the widow and the orphan 
know they can safely come and get your best, to 




THE HUMAN REVOLUTION 


67 


whom broken men and women turn as the thirsty to 
a spring of water, than to sit on a throne? Oh, it's 
to be the shadow of a great rock in a weary land that's 
the great lifel 

Lord, the Spirit is willing, hut the Flesh is weak. 
The good I would do, I do not. Yet, Lord, Thou knowest 
my frame and rememberest that I am dust; and on Thy 
mercy I throw myself: lead me to the Rock that is higher 
than I, so that through him I may become the shadow of 
a great rock in a weary land. Make me such a Man as 
Jesus was, the man that Thou didst design me to be. 
Amen. 








HELL 


Some years ago an English journal had a sympo« 
sium on the question, “Is there a hell?’^ They were 
complimentary enough to ask me my opinion on the 
subject, and they printed my reply under the heading, 
“Hell Completes the Universe/^ That was not ex¬ 
actly what I had said; what I had said was that it did 
not seem to me that the universe would be complete 
without a hell. What I meant by that was that it 
seemed to me to be so evident that in a moral uni¬ 
verse a man must reap what he sows, and that in 
this life so many people seem to escape the reaping 
of the full harvest of what they have sown, that 
there must be some provision in the universe for 
squaring up the account. There are men in the 
world who are selfish and greedy and they seem to 
get away with it, while there are others who are 
selfless and loyal and yet their lives seem full of 
trouble and misfortune. And the simplest justice 
requires that there shall be an arrangement for strik¬ 
ing some kind of balance. 

I confess, however, that I am not quite so sure 
about the soundness of that argument as I was. Or 
at least about the soundness of the conclusion to 
which it then led me. But the main point of it is still 
ce tain y valid. It is that evil is followed by retribu¬ 
tion as surely as the night follows the day. And I am 
inclined to believe that if we could see all the inner life 


60 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

of mon, we should see that in this life their sin bears its 
full penalty. It may not bear it in the form of out¬ 
ward ruin, but in inward misery, in a sense of failure, 
in a remorse that will not die down, in bitter and irre¬ 
deemable poverty of mind and spirit. It is not given 
to us to penetrate into the secret places of men^s 
hearts, and we can not tell what anguish of spirit, 
what hopeless destitution of mind, what sense of 
despair and futility, are hidden behind the well-tailored 
clothes and the well-groomed figure of that man whose 
apparent success has been gained by fraud and the 
exploitation of the weak. And many a man goes 
about the world with every sign of temporal failure 
upon him, who nevertheless goes abroad with the 
peace of God in his heart and with a great swelling 
hope in his spirit that is never confounded. As I grow 
older and my observation of men becomes wider and 
deeper, the less do I feel the need of a fxnal and ul¬ 
timate hell in order to square the ways of the universe 
with the justice of God. 

Our fathers had much to say of the “day of wrath.'' 
This is of course the day of judgment when the scrolls 
will be unrolled and every man will have to answer for 
the deeds done in the body. It belongs to the same 
cycle of thought and feeling as the idea of hell. It is a 
graphic way of embodying the thought of retribution, 
its certainty and its precision. But will there be a 
specific day of judgment, a day when the quick and the 
dead will be arraigned before the dreaded Judge and 
their records scanned and judgment passed on them? 
I am reminded of a saying of that wonderful but little- 
read old writer. Sir Thomas Browne—“I do not so 


HELL 


61 


much wonder that there was once a flood as that 
there is not a flood always.” And I think that there 
is a suggestion for us here. For while we may be un¬ 
ready to believe that there will be a day of judgment at 
the end of time, we must most surely believe that there 
is a day of judgment always. The day of judgment is 
now on. The processes of judgment are already and 
steadily at work and whether they complete their 
work in time or not we may be sure that they will not. 
cease to operate until every trai sgi'ession and dis¬ 
obedience has received its due recompense of reward. 
This is the great fact that we have to lay both hands 
upon as the surest thing in all this scheme of things, 
that there is no mesh wide enough in the moral order 
to enable the smallest sin to escape unrequited. 

But is there no such thing as forgiveness? The 
answer is that there is forgiveness, and that there ^ 
is abundant and royal forgiveness offered and given to 
men. But you have to distinguish between two things. 
Sin is in the first p'ace a vio ation of the moral order. 
The moral order is a very complex and organic affair; 
and when it has been set in motion nothing can stop it. 
It goes on its way inexorably, linking cause to effect 
in a sure succession and leading the sowing of sin to 
the harvest of tragedy. And God Himself will not do 
anything to interfere with its working. For if He did,. 
He would plunge His whole universe into chaos. The 
moral order must go its way without deviation or pause. 
And if you cast grit of sin into it, that grit it will grind 
whatever be the pain to you, until it is ground out of 
the scheme of things entirely. So that there is a sense 
in which it is true that no sin is ever forgiven. For 


62 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

sins done in the mind or done in the body we must pay 
for in the mind and in the body. And there is never a 
rebate or any compounding with your creditor. You 
have to meet the bill to the uttermost farthing. The 
moral order can not forgive or cancel the debt. 

But sin is not alone an offense against a moral 
order, it is an offense against a person, against God. 
And what a moral order can not do, a person may. 
We do not sufficiently realize that what makes moral 
evil sin is that it is a breach with God. It is the rup¬ 
ture of a relation between persons. And while as 
moral evil it can not be ignored, and must carry the 
whole weight of its consequences without any abate¬ 
ment, yet as an affair between persons it can be wiped 
out. That is, while you have to bear the penalty of 
your sin in your body and in your mind, your ruptured 
relation with God may be restored. Sin carries in 
itself the seeds of retribution, and there is a law of 
moral gravitation which sees to it that every trans¬ 
gression and disobedience receives its due recompense 
of reward. And not all your penitence can arrest this 
process. Yet all the same, and at the same time, you 
may be set right with God; and whereas we were out¬ 
side the circle of fellowship with God, out of harmony 
with God, God restores us to Himself. And when 
that happens the penalty that you have to pay for 
your sin changes its character. It ceases to be retri¬ 
bution and becomes a discipline. It is no longer a 
punishment but a means of grace. Your Inferno is 
transmuted into a Purgatorio. 

We acknowledge, 0 Lord our God, with shame and 
sorrow how often and how grievously we come short of 


HELL 


63 


Thy Glory and of our Duty; we think with intolerable 
pain^of our moral defeats and our transgressions of 
Thy Law of Love, Lord, grant us ever the strength and 
the fortitude to endure the strokes of Thy rod, to take 
bravely as Thy children should the punishment we have 
invited. Nevertheless, grant us to be at peace with 
Thee; and of Thy Grace, let the harvest of tares we have 
in our folly sown be transfigured into a garner of whole^ 
some grain by which our souls may live. Amen, 



THE NEW KINGSHIP 


This is Palm Sunday as I write; and I have been 
reading over again the story of the entry into Jeru¬ 
salem. As I read, I was reminded of two incidents in 
the course of the Palestine campaign in the war which 
make a significant contrast and suggest another more 
significant. When the Emir Feisul entered Damascus 
it was in the traditional manner of the victorious orien¬ 
tal potentate. Cavalcades of dashing horsemen en¬ 
tered the city at full gallop, with much shouting, gun¬ 
firing and crackling of fireworks. And presently Feisul 
followed in all the pomp and circumstance of his vic¬ 
tory. But when, a few weeks earlier, General Allenby 
entered Jerusalem, he came on foot, as a friend might 
have come, for doubtless, being a good Christian and 
having a sense of the fitness of things, he recalled how 
Another greater than he had come within those walls 
many centuries before. And in the contrast between 
the event of that first far-off Palm Sunday and the 
entry of Feisul into Damiascus, you have a character¬ 
istic antithesis between the wisdom of the natural 
man and the wisdom of the Son of Man. 

Jesus was well aware of what he was doing when 
he came into Jerusalem riding an ass. I think that 
he never did anything more deliberately. I have seen 
the incident described as a “piece of innocent play¬ 
acting.^' But surely this is a grave misreading of it. 
The actor impersonates, he assumies the habit and 


66 


THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 


interprets the character of another man. But Jesus 
was plainly interpreting hirnself and no other. What 
we have here is an acted parable. He had spoken 
many parables; now he acts one. Something is being 
taught in a living picture. And the deliberation and 
the sought-out publicity of the incident suggest that 
the lesson was of a momentous and capital kind. 
Consider also the moment—the moment to which 
Jesus had looked forv/ard from the day on which he 
had set his face steadfastly to go to Jerusalem. Just 
ahead of him lay the supreme apocalypse of his soul, 
the unveiling of himself in the whole inmost truth of 
his being in the face of the vested interests of worldli¬ 
ness in Church and State. And it was surely no secon¬ 
dary utterance that he was intending at such an hour. 
This was no “piece of innocent play-acting,'’ a side¬ 
show on the road. It was a manifesto, a nailing of the 
colors to the mast, the prologue that furnished the 
clue to all that was to come. 

An intelligent by-stander who knew his Scriptures 
would at least see something of the point of it. He 
would recall the old prophecy of the king coming on an 
ass, and he would gather that this Galilean teacher was 
setting himself up for a king. And he would shrug his 
shoulders at the futility of it. Others there had been 
who had raised a standard to which brave men had 
rallied, to try to re-establish the old Jewish kingdom, 
but the story had always the same pitiful ending. 
The Roman power had proved too strong, and the 
end had been failure. What chance then had this 
unarmed Galilean where strong men had fallen down? 
So he shrugged his shoulders again and went home. 


THE NEW KINGSHIP 


67 


But he had missed the most significant part of the 
procession. He had observed the Galilean, the 
crowd, the shouting, the palm-leaves. But he had not 
paid attention to the ass. 

For the king who comes on an ass must mean 
something different by kingship from the king that 
comes on a charger, with a shining body-guard and a 
flourish of trumpets. There were kings enough 
in the world—great emperors like Caesar and little 
kinglets like Herod—and they were all of a piece. 
Jesus had observed them and had summed the matter 
up in a very concise word: “The rulers of the nations 
lord it over them.” The king was the great man, the 
superman who commanded other men, who had 
authority over them, even to the power of life and 
death. 

He exacted service and obedience; and if in 
his humaner moments he was betrayed into any kind¬ 
liness toward the people whom he ruled he accounted 
it to himself for righteousness and recorded it on his 
coins. He stamped them with the word ‘^euergetes” 
which means benefactor, just as Henry VIII styled 
himself “Defender of the Faith,” even after he had 
abandoned the faith that he had defended. And in 
order to bolster up their authority still farther, it was 
the pleasant habit of these kings to claim sanctity for 
their persons, affirming themselves either to be de¬ 
scended from the gods, like the Mikado of Japan, or to 
be kings by divine right, like James I. All through, the 
idea of kingship is associated with notions of ascend¬ 
ency and authority. “But,” said Jesus, “it shall not 
be so among you, but he that would be greatest among 


68 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

you, let him be the servant of all/' This is the new 
kingship; and it was of this doctrine of kingship that 
Jesus was making dramatic disclosure on the road to 
Jerusalem. 

And he was challenging all that traditional cycle 
of doctrine—sovereignty, ascendency, power and 
dominion—as he saw it exercised on the political side 
by the Roman empire and on the ecclesiastical side by 
the Jewish hierarchy. He was affirming the Royalty 
of Humility, the Sovereignty of Service. The king- 
ships of the world did indeed rest upon service—^the 
forced service of others. But Jesus proclaims a new 
doctrine of social integration—^the doctrine of lowly 
and willing service. The king was the symbol and 
source of political unity; but the very doctrine of his 
office exalted him above and so separated him from 
the unity he was supposed to preserve; and his very 
methods of preserving it—coercion and fear—^sowed 
seeds of disruption which soon or late never failed to 
bear fruit. The true king is the man who by his life 
is creating a social unity about himself, who generates 
and diffuses friendship and comradeship. He may not 
have the title, but he has the character and he does 
the work. This is he who achieves a true royalty, who 
gains the only abiding throne—^the throne in our 
hearts. It was said to me the other day concerning 
such a man, and said with palpable spontaneity, '‘That 
man is a prince." That proves my point. I care not, 
for myself, who wears crowns of gold if so be that I 
deserve to wear that crown, the invisible crown of love. 
And it was this capital and final truth that Jesus was 
proclaiming on the road to Jerusalem, in that prologue 




THE NEW KINGSHIP 


69 


that was presently consummated in the deathless 
wonder of the Cross. 

Thou Son of Man, in whom are all the treasures of 
knowledge and wisdom hidden, deliver us from the fool¬ 
ish wisdom of this world, hy which thou wast crucified. 
Give us the insight to see that a man's glory lies in be¬ 
coming a servant as thou hecamest, and that the heights 
of life are reached hy way of its depths. We are infatu¬ 
ated with empty dreams of greatness and power, and 
they turn to ashes before the dream is ended. We pray 
that we may take for our wisdom the foolishness of God 
and for our strength His weakness. Amen. 





i 




1 , 


i 


1 

I 

i 


1 






THE KING ON THE ASS 


Some of the reflections that passed through my 
mind on Palm Sunday have carried me a good deal past 
the semi-political meditation which I reported in my 
last paper. And if, by this time, Palm Sunday has 
once more become a faintish memory, permit me to 
make an ample apology for recalling it by saying that I 
wish every Sunday were Palm Sunday and Easter day 
as well. Which, good readers, is after all not an 
apology but an aggravation. 

But what I set out to say was that if Palm* Sun¬ 
day should make a difference to our politics, what a 
difference it should make to our theology, and would, 
if only we understood it! It is one of the curiosities 
of theological research how profoundly our political 
ideas have colored our religious thinldng, especially 
our thoughts about God. The Jahwe of the Old 
Testament—until we come to the great prophetic 
tradition—is a glorified Oriental sheikh. The Pres¬ 
byterian tradition has been discolored throughout by 
the Roman doctrine of sovereignty upon which Cal¬ 
vin rested his system. To him God seems to have been 
a sort of celestial version of the Roman Emperor, the 
seat of absolute power, who disposed of issues of life 
and death at will; and you have only to add the con¬ 
ception of omniscience to this in order to discover how 
the doctrine of Predestination was born. The grim¬ 
ness of Calvinism comes from the application of a re- 


72 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

lentless logic to this central idea of absolute sovereignty. 
In these days of limited monarchy, we have, as Francis 
Thompson wittily says, “made the Almighty into a 
constitutional monarchy, with certain state grants of 
worship but no control over public affairs.'' And in a 
republic, I have observed that God is apt to look like 
an eternal President. But you may search the Gos¬ 
pels from end to end, and you will descry in the 
mind of Jesus no sign of a political Deity. The God 
of Jesus is a God who serves. It would turn most of 
our conventional theologies upside down if we de- 
politicalized them, if at the heart of them we set the 
Love of God instead of the Sovereignty of God. And 
this is only another way of speaking of making them 
Christian. 

But what in that event would become of the pre- 
millenarians? I am afraid that I do not like millen- 
arians. That does not mean that I do not like some 
people who are professedly pre-millenarians. But I 
do not care for them when they are (so to speak) 
millenarianizing. They strike me then as not being 
wholly rational. They seem, obsessed. And they are 
always so cocksure and so censorious. I am of course 
thinking of the militant millenarians. There are 
some millenarians of a quiet and lowly mind who 
cherish their great expectation with a tremulous joy. 
But the others—miay God have mercy upon them for 
their intolerance and their truculence, who in their zeal 
for Christ deny the spirit of Jesus! 

But what strikes me as peculiarly grotesque is 
that they envisage the second coming of Christ as a 
sort of display of secular royalty, and they speak of 


THE KING ON THE ASS 


73 


his '‘personal reign” upon earth as though he were 
going to be a kind of edition de luxe of a king. This is 
to naiss the whole meaning of the Gospel. And one of 
the profoundest lessons of history. The Christian 
revelation has had no more conspicuous influence 
in the world than in the abolition of privi¬ 
leged classes, and one consequence of this has been 
the gradual diminution of the glam.our of kingship. 
The war indeed saw the last of antique orders of king- 
ship. And it is in this discredited vesture that the 
pre-millenaiians clothe their returning Lord. 

Now I am going to return at another time to the 
whole question of adventism. There is a truth in it 
which is I think of the substance of the Christian Gos¬ 
pel. And it is essential that we should divest this 
truth of the deplorable habit in which it is clad to-day. 
But, meantime, it is worth pointing out that if there 
is to be a Second Advent, we have the clue to its man¬ 
ner in the story of Palm Sunday. When the King 
comes, may he not come as he once came, riding upon 
an ass? 

I know all about the great imagery of the apoc¬ 
alypse passages in the Gospels, but we are not to 
accept that imagery as though it was a literal picture of 
coming events. That is to treat the Gospels with that 
dull unimaginative literalism with which the Jews 
treated their Scriptures and against which Jesus was 
forever protesting. Of this we may be sure, that 
unless God's nature has changed in the meantime. He 
will show Himself as He has ever done—in great 
humility. And when the Son of Man comes in his 
glory, we need not be astonished to And that his glory 


74 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

consists in a peasant's sniock or a suit of worker's 
overalls. 

For the Son of Man came not to be ministered to 
but to niinister. And however and whenever he 
comes, he will come not as a king, but as a servant, 
not as a monarch, but as a man among men. And 
all this talk about his “personal reign" on earth is in 
stark contradiction of all that we know of his mind, 
unless we interpret his royalty as the royalty of hu¬ 
mility and his sovereignty as one of lowly—^yes, and 
the lowliest—service. 

Lord of our Life, who art the Fountain of Light and 
the Reason of Reason, keep us rational^ deliver us from 
the blindness of literalism and dogmatism and censorious¬ 
ness; and give us that vivid rationality which comes to 
those who commit an open mind to the spirit of God and 
who thereby acquire the mind of Christ. Amen. 


VIA DOLOROSA 


^^The Son of man goeth as it was written of him."^ 
Jesus no doubt had been living much in the Fifty-third 
of Isaiah, and he saw it all happening to himself. *‘He 
was despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows 
and acquainted with grief; and we hid as it were our 
faces from him; he was despised and we esteemed him 
not.” There is in Jerusalem a narrow street which 
tradition has hallowed as Via Dolorosa, the sorrowful 
way. But from the moment when he steadfastly set 
his face to go to Jerusalem, it was Via Dolorosa all the 
way, yes, and even long before. When he saw the as¬ 
siduity and the instancy with which the ecclesiastical 
authorities were silencing his public ministry in Gali¬ 
lee he foresaw the road before him, a road of conflict, of 
humiliation, of growing loneliness, the unrelenting 
effort to force him out of the comm-on life of his people, 
to brand him as a leper, to drive him to isolation— 
effort that would not rest until it had brought him to 
death and shame. And what sensitiveness to mental 
anguish his enemies spared was exposed to fickle 
friends. ''And at that season, many of his disciples 
turned back and walked with him no more.” Even 
the inner circle of the twelve had not remained proof 
against the invasion of unworthy fear and of treason. 
The traveler of the Sorrowful Way became lonelier 
every furlong of the road. 

"Whatever fine comedy may have gone before/^ 


76 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

says Pascal, ‘'the last act is always tragedy. We 
must die alone.Yet surely with no such loneliness 
as this. For it is commonly given to a man to go 
down to the last gateway accompanied by an escort 
of his beloved, ministered to by loving hands on the 
way; and it is denied to no man, if he wills it so, to 
enter the gateway with even mightier, friendlier, more 
reassuring companionship. Yet to the Son of Man 
was denied this last mercy. “My God, my God, why 
hast thou forsaken me?^^ Why the supreme moment 
of a perfect obedience should also be the moment of 
utter dereliction, the very midnight of his soul, I do 
not know. No man knows, for on this God has kept 
His own counsel. Yet so it was—a loneliness that 
passeth understanding. 

The paradox of the matter is that his loneliness 
was the price he paid for his love, for the very genius 
of love is to dispel loneliness. It is the power that 
draws us together in fellowship, friendship, comrade¬ 
ship, the subtle essence that makes a house a home; 
the warm potent constraint that forgives injuries, 
heals wounds, binds up broken hearts, and gathers 
the solitary into families. Yet the greatest love that 
this world ever knew had little of these gracious and 
enriching responses; at the end of the day, its reward 
was an unlit dungeon of forsakenness. 

Yet the paradox is not hard to resolve. It is 
*one thing to love men; it is another thing to love them 
so well as to want to teach them to love. Men will 
accept your love and the gifts and services that your 
love brings to them; and they may perchance give you 
a little grudging love in return. But if you love them 


VIA DOLOROSA 


77' 


long enough and well enough, a point comes when your 
love may convict them of selfishness. Then one of 
two things will happen. One man will bow his head 
in shame, for an ungrateful beast, and cry. Lord, he 
merciful unto me a sinner; and he will love you as you 
love him. The other man will hate you in his heart, 
and some day he may betraj^ you with a kiss. And 
Jesus had, as you know, both experiences—of the one, 
a little; of the other, much. Perhaps we should also 
find it so if we loved as relentlessly, as truthfully as he. 

But Jesus had to do with other than common folk. 
He provoked the hate of the worst kind of selfishness, 
the entrenched selfishness of “vested interests.^^ For 
in this kind of selfishness there is an impersonal quality 
which is inaccessible to human affection. You may 
overcome the selfishness of a man; but I do not know 
that you can overcome the miassed selfishness of a 
class. It may perhaps be shattered by the high ex¬ 
plosive of a religious contagion, but not otherwise.- 
Assail it, and it will try and perhaps it will succeed in 
doing you to death. Assail it even for the love you 
bear the souls that are lost in it, and it will show you 
no mercy. That is the fashion of it. Our vested 
interests will turn on truth and love and religion or* 
anjdhing that threatens to touch them, and if they are 
pushed will not hesitate to take cover behind the name- 
of religion and patriotism or any other affection or 
sanctity that may serve their turn. It was against 
such a hard, impersonal, massed selfishness that lacks 
a soul, lacks bowels of compassion, lacks even the rudi- 
m*ents of a conscience, that Jesus found himself. It: 
is no mitigation of the crime against Jesus that it was. 


73 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

done for the glory of God. For it is one of the painful 
discoveries one makes in religious history that eccle¬ 
siastical officers contract a color-blindness which fails 
to distinguish between the glory of God and their own 
interests. And that is why religious persecution has 
always been more cruel and implacable than any 
other. 

It was this temper that forced Jesus to travel the 
Sorrowful Way. And that was how Jesus found it. 
The common people heard him gladly; and so long as 
they were left alone, they continued to hear him. But 
the common people of those days were not immune 
from the poisoning of the mind any more than are we; 
and the ecclesiastical grandees were as alive to the 
uses of propaganda as a modern government or a 
powerful corporation. The common people turned 
away from Jesus because the vested interests tainted 
the sources of public information. And in the system 
•of the vested religious interests of that day there was 
no room either for the practise or the teaching of love. 
For it was essentially an aristocratic system; and the 
practise of love is apt to do grave damage to the 
aristocratic principle. For it involves the pernicious 
notion that you should behave decently to publicans, 
and even pass the time of day with sinners; and that 
would not do at all. A privileged class will allow 
neither love nor truth to compromise its privilege. 
For their privilege is their religion, whatever lip ser¬ 
vice they may do to another lo^'alty. 

* ♦ 

Now, Caiaphas and Annas and the Pharisee lead- 
•ers were not dull people. Within their own circle of 


VIA DOLOROSA 


79 

interests, they had very astute and penetrating in¬ 
tellects; and I have no doubt that the proper and 
conventional folk of the time considered them what 
we would call statesmanlike. They were not only 
clever at playing the political game; they realized that 
if the thing Jesus was doing went on very far, it would 
break up the whole scheme of things for which they 
stood. In a word, they made the rather remarkable 
discovery that love was a kind of high-explosive. 
And this is the other side of love. I have called it an 
energy of integration; but it may be an energy of 
disruption. 

I read the other day a little story told by a friend 
of mine; it had to do with a visit paid by two Welsh 
peasants to the English town of Preston, where the 
son of one of them lay wounded in a military hospital. 
They were both unfamiliar with towns, and both 
spoke English only with difficulty. When they left 
the railway station, they were in great bewilderment, 
and the only object in sight that had an aspect of 
familiarity was a policeman. To him they went, and 
he was very authoritative and official and superior 
and peremptory. But when one of them took out 
from his pocket the telegram about the wounded lad 
which had brought them on this unaccustomed jour¬ 
ney and showed it to the constable, well, as one of 
them said, ‘Tn a twinkling the policeman went away 
and the man came out.'' And that has struck me as a 
parable of most of our life. Our relations to one 
another are so impersonal, so official, so professional, 
so institutional, that a direct spontaneous human 
relationship is hardly ever possible. The physician 


80 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

will speak of Ms '‘cases,” the lawyer of his clients, the 
minister of his parishioners, the merchant of his cus¬ 
tomers, and something of the man, and sometimes a 
good deal of the man, is lost in all these relations. 
And I am not sure but that the greatest harm that the 
modem development of industiy and big business 
has done to life is that it has mechanized, formalized, 
institutionalized, the relation of man to man. In the 
old days master and journeyman worked in the same 
shop and ate at the same table; but to-day what a 
great guH yawns between the owner of the tools and 
the owner of the labor! And in the mass, a great deal 
of our life is taken up in these fornial professional and 
institutional relations; by the time we are through 
with them there is little enough of it left to nourish 
the simple spontaneous relationships in which at 
last lies the real joy of life. I am not at all sure 
that a revival of love in our modern civilization 
might not provoke a social revolution by the side of 
which the Russian Revolution would seem a rather 
trivial and messy accident. For it would destroy red 
tape, professionalism, institutionalism. The police¬ 
man would disappear and the man would come in 
sight! 

And this is what love peculiarly does —it evokes 
the man, the human essence beneath the uniform, 
whether the uniform be of the visible or of the in¬ 
visible kind. That was just what Jesus did; he evoked 
the man—both where the man was swathed in opaque 
folds of pride, and where he lay hidden and despised 
in the rags of an outcast, in Joseph of Arimathea and 
in Matthew the publican. But the institutionalists 


VIA DOLOROSA 


81 


and the professional ists scented danger in the proceed¬ 
ing, saw it threatened the stability of the Church and 
their authority . . . and the massed impersonal 
anger of the organized religion of his day hounded 
him through the Via Dolorosa to the Place of the Skull. 

0 Love that wilt not let me go, quicken thyself in me. 
Forgive me my lovelessness; and banish from me all 
pride and selfseeking which make me untrue to myself 
and to thee. I pray for a great, unyielding love like 
thine, 0 Christ—even though it bring me to a Sorrowful 
Way. I am willing to go that way, for I shall meet thee 
there; and I know that at last it leads over the crest of 
the hill into life and peace. Amen, 


r 


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THE TRIUMPH OF THE CROSS 

Once upon a time—and very long ago—a poet, 
struck by the wonder of man, sang the grandeur of 
the human promise. Confidently he descried the glory 
and honor, the power and dominion, to which man was 
foreordained; and this splendor of destiny seemed so 
sure that the poet sang of it as though it was already 
come to pass. 

Some centuries later, an unknown writer, of 
whose work only one letter has survived the vicissi¬ 
tudes of time, recalls this old poem and quotes it. 
“But,'^ he goes on to say, “this thing has not hap¬ 
pened. Man has not attained to this honor and 
glory of which the poet sang. His promised empire 
has not materialized. 

Yet I imagine that there were men in those days 
who would have disputed this judgment. At least, 
they would say, consider the progress that man has 
made. Think of his achievements—of these great 
roads we have made which reach to the ends of the 
earth; of these wonderful aqueducts we have built; 
of the advances we have made in architecture, in 
shipbuilding, in agriculture, in metal-work; of the 
great improvement in military arms, the increased 
size of the army; and, best of all, look at the Roman 
Empire, the greatest and best thing of its kind in the 
world. We may not have arrived; but we are surely 
getting on—don't be downhearted. 



84 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

But our writer would reply that he was not at all 
downhearted; what his critic had said was no doubt 
true and very impressive, but he did not derive his 
consolation from that region. For, while it might be 
the case that mankind had made a great deal of 
progress in improving the world in which it lived, it 
did not in the least follow that it had improved itself. 
It might be true that man had acquired a mastery over 
some parts of nature, but that did not necessarily 
mean that he had gained the mastery over himself. 
His outward progress did not at all prove that he had 
made any real progress in the things that made him, 
in the distinctive values of his manhood. 

But, the critic might then ask, ''In that case, 
upon what grounds do you base your hope for man- 
kind?^^ And here is the peculiar answer that this 
old writer gives. "I base it,” he seems to say, 
"upon the fact that one man has actually made good, 
has risen to the full stature of manhood.” We do not 
yet see all things put into subjection to him (to m>an, 
that is), says the writer, "but we do see Jesus, crowned 
with glory and honor.” 

Now, I can imagine the critic scratching his 
head a little. Progress, success, meant to him the big 
things, the empire, the great roads, the vast engineer¬ 
ing schemes, the new splendid battering rams and 
catapults that the army used; and yet here was a 
writing fellow who took no stock in these things and 
talked of some one who had made good, of whom he 
had never heard. This Jesus, who was he? What did 
he do? 

And the writing fellow answers: "Well, he died.” 


THE TRIUMPH OF THE CROSS 


86 


"'Who for the suffering of death is crowned with glory 
and honor/^ 

And upon this, the critic turns on his heel and says 

something under his breath about sentimental idiots. 

* * 

We do not yet see man crowned with glory and 
honor. W^e do indeed see him furnished with tele¬ 
phones and telegraphs, Pullman cars and automobiles, 
aeroplanes and superdreadnoughts, gramophones and 
pianolas, poison-gas and armored tanks—oh, and a 
thousand things beside! He has made enormous 
strides in knowledge and invention; and he has evolved 
many devices for the preservation and the security 
and the comfort of his bodily life; of material wealth 
his gathered store is beyond reckoning. And this is 
no doubt a sort of progress—or at least a movement 
of some kind. But it is by no means clear whether 
this enormous express-train movement is taking us at 
last to the City of Dreadful and Endless Night or to 
the City of God. 

And I can, as I look around about me and observe 
the low estate of truth and man^s inhumanity to man, 
I can understand how sensitive spirits fall into moods 
of cynicism and pessimism After so long a time, if 
this is the best we can do, what is the good of trjdng 
to do anything for man? Oh, I know that there is 
more good in the world than there ever was; the sad¬ 
ness of it is that there should be so much more evil, 
too! Why, if our capacity for goodness is more, 
should our capacity for evil not be less? Is there any 
hope for our humanity? Shall we ever shake off this 
tragic entail of selfishness and inhumanity? Must our 



86 


THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 


latent goodness, our capacity for truth and love, ever 
be as the smoking flax and the bruised reed? No, 
man has not yet made good. His promise is un¬ 
realized. We do not see him crowned with glory and 
honor. 

* * 

No, but we do see Jesus, crowned with glory and 
honor. And this old letter-writer is all the time anx¬ 
ious to have us remember that this Jesus is one of us, 
bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh. Jesus, he tells us, 
made good, and he anchors his faith to that. Do you 
think that it is not in flesh and blood to realize its 
possibilities, to achieve its destiny, to reach its ap¬ 
pointed goal? Then, he says, look at Jesus; he did it; 
he did it, and in him we all did it; and through him we 
shall all do it yet. In Jesus, man showed what he 
could do, what we all may do, if only we carry on and 
keep the faith, running (as this writer says later in his 
letter) with patience the race that is set before us, 
looking unto Jesus. 

But this Jesus, what did he do? How did he 
make good? Well, answers our writer, he died. He 
died? Yes, he died. 'Tor the suffering of death, he 
was crowned with glory and honor.’^ But there is 
nothing unusual in that. We all die, soon or late: 
nor indeed is there anything unique in the circumstance 
that we remember Jesus because he died. We remem¬ 
ber Polycarp—to name only one of a great company— 
for the same reason. All of which is true, our writer 
would say, but all the same there is a difference. 
Whatever we may say of the noble army of martyrs, 
there is not one among them whose death was the 


THE TRIUMPH OF THE CROSS 


87 


perfect and inevitable flower of his life as was the 
death of Jesus, none whose death rounded off his life 
so fittingly, as also none whose death has had so great 
historical consequences. It may not be easy to say in 
words just why this is so—but somehow or other the 
cross seems a perfect and absolute thing. It was the 
essential Man in the Perfect Act. It is the high-water 
mark of moral achievement by flesh and blood. It is 
the ethical C Major of the race. Yet it is not the 
end of the matter; it is rather but a promise. It is 
both God's pledge to man and man's pledge to God 
that man will yet make good This Jesus, says our 
writer, is to lead many sons to glory and to become the 
first born among many brethren. 

We thank Thee, 0 God, for the mighty hope we read 
in the Cross of Calvary. We thank Thee for that Su-- 
preme Moment of a Perfect Obedience; and though it 
seem to us to he a height too high for our aspiring, we 
take heart of grace in the remembrance that he whose 
Cross it is was bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh. In 
him we see the promise of our victory, and even amid the 
difficulties and reverses of our struggle we renew our 
confidence in Thee by whose Grace he triumphed and who 
wilt also bring us to the end of our little day undishonored 
and undefeated. Amen. 








PAX CHRISTI 


^Teace I leave with you; my peace I give unto 
you” The peace of Christ is a gift. It is moreover a 
gift after its own kind. “Not as the world giveth give 
I unto you.'^ The world has its gifts to offer; but it is 
not the way of the world to give something for nothing. 
It requires a quid pro quo; its gifts are (as it were) for 
sale; they are investments from which it expects a re¬ 
turn; they are bribes by which it seeks to purchase a 
man's soul. They are gifts without generosity, niggard 
and sparing, mere bargains, buying in the cheapest mar¬ 
ket. “Not as the world giveth give I unto you;" but 
rather freely, prodigally, royally, without money and 
without price. “Not as the world giveth." Indeed no. 
For the world gives only to take back its gifts—^it 
teases, tantalizes. But what Christ gives is, as the 
children say, “for keeps." 

To this peace, most of us are strangers. We have 
war within us; we are at odds with ourselves. “I 
delight," said St. Paul, “in the law of God after the 
inward man; but I see a different law in my members 
warring against the ’aw of my mind." What a candid 
realist was this man Paul! As you heard him—“when 
the word was on him to deliver"—you would have 
supposed him to be at peace with himself, one whole 
undivided soul; yet here he confesses a trouble which 
pursues all of us, and cries, almost in despair, “Who 
shall deliver me from this body of death?" Well, we 


90 


THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 


know all about it too—this fierce inner schism, this 
“divided self,'' as William James called it, this Jekyll- 
and-Hyde combination that dwells under the skin of 
all of us. And the schism is no clear-cut abiding 
alignment of conflicting forces; but a confused melee 
of impulses and passions and affections that shift 
their dispositions unceasingly. “I find,” I heard a 
man once say, “I am more saved in some parts of 
me than in other parts; I find I am more saved some 
parts of the day and of the week than at others.'^ 
And that is a true saying. “The divided self”—yes, 
the divided, sub-divided, and sub-sub-divided self, 
“A clear case,” said a friend to me the other day con¬ 
cerning a certain person of his acquaintance, “a clear 
case of dual personality.” And I thought to myself— 
“But what if he could see under my skin! What 
would he see? Nothing so simple as a dual or a triple 
or even a quadruple personality—but a multiple, a 
very crowd.” What is thy name? said Jesus to the 
demoniac. “My name is Legion,” he answered, “for 
there are many of us.” My name is Legion; and so is 
yom’s. And there is going to be nothing like Peace 
for you or me until this wild stormy incongruity of 
impulses and passions is tamed, wooed, shepherded 
into some kind of unity—until Some One greater than 
ourselves rides the storm and says to these fretful 
winds and waves, ‘'Peace, he still.” 

The other day I read an article in which the 
writer contrasts Balzac with Manzoni. He says that 
Balzac’s work reflects thoughout Balzac’s own fret¬ 
fulness, while he speaks of the Olympian serenity of 
Manzoni. I have no competency to pass judgment 


PAX CHRISTI 


91 


on this criticism. But I can see that a great work of 
art can only come from a spirit “at leisure from itself.” 
And perhaps the littleness, the insignificance, the 
pettiness of our achievement arises from the sheer 
distraction of our inner restlessness. Few of us possess 
serenity, composure, equipoise, that state in which the 
energy of a moment can be directed to a single end, be 
canalized upon a single object. So much of our 
strength is wasted in the attempt to walk straight, to 
preserve a respectable front which shall hide the 
anarchy of our spirits; and that is as much as we can do. 
We have no balance of energy left over to turn a lovely 
fancy into a fact or to make some fair dream come true. 
And at best, this front of composure is frail and brittle; 
and it takes but little to crack it and to reveal the 
tension and the fretfulness it conceals. 

This is I think due at bottom to the mistaken idea 
that self-discipline is merely an affair of suppression. 
That was the old Jewish view; and you find it in St. 
Paul—“I buffet my body and bring it into subjection 
lest after I have preached to others, I myself should be 
a castaway.” In this, there is a necessary truth. It is 
a narrow way that leads to life; and it was and is neces¬ 
sary to affirm this view over against the Greek doc¬ 
trine of self-expression which held that fullness of life 
was an affair of expressing and satisfying every natural 
impulse 

But the Jew supposed that the only method of 
going the narrow way was by amputation, by trun¬ 
cating life, by the suppression of natural impulse; and 
there are some times when and some people for whom 
this is the only way—a certain ruthlessness of self 


92 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

repression. ‘'If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out.'^ 
But in the main—at most times and for most people— 
there is a better way. To find the narrow way that 
leads to life we must needs be unified, gathered to¬ 
gether, not suppression but concentration, bringing 
every impulse and every motive and every affection 
into captivity to a single purpose, to a single lord. 
And this carries with it the sequel that many of our 
impulses are re-directed and so transfigured. We no 
longer suppose that any of our native impulses are 
inherently evil; even our egoism may be transmuted 
into a holy thing. The trouble with them is that 
they are misdirected, unco-ordinated; and so they fall 
into conflict and reduce us to chaos. The road to life 
is the road of unification—“the unitive way,” as the 
medieval mystics called it, which is a road of trans¬ 
figuration as well. Our wayward impulses, our tur¬ 
bulent passions, our unshepherded affections, are won 
into a single energy and take their place in a single per¬ 
sonal whole. This is, I think, what St. Paul meant 
when he spoke of bringing every thought into cap¬ 
tivity to the obedience of Christ. 

And this inward unity is Peace—not merely in the 
sense that our hidden conflict has ceased, but that we 
have achieved the serenity, the composure in which we 
can do those high things in which we are now barren. 
There are tasks of creation, of discovery, of social 
vocation and redemption for which the world is calling 
loudly to-day and we are not doing them because we 
are chaotic within; life is frittered away in this sub¬ 
cutaneous strife. There are stored within us vast re¬ 
serves of personal energy of a spiritual sort which 



PAX CHRISTI 


93 


might easily transform the face of life, could they but 
be released; but to-day they run to waste in the desert 
sands of our anarchic inner life. Yet there is available 
a positive creative inward peace—and it is available 
for all of us; and, supreme miracle though it be, it is to 
be had for the asking; the only condition is that one 
should earnestly desire it. “My peace I give unto 
you.^^ Hold out your hand for it. . . and you have it. 
And truly it is as simple as that. 

Thou who art our Peace, Shepherd who gatherest up 
these vagrant divided selves of ours and makest them into 
a single thing, winning them to a single purpose, so that 
they tell a single tale, out of the distraction and restlessness 
of our hidden life we cry to Thee, Do Thou, of Thy mercy,- 
ride these storms within us and hid the winds and the 
waves subside, that we may share with Thee Thy Peace, 
the Peace which can not he broken and of which they ta 
whom it is given can never he despoiled. Amen. 





STUPID BUT FAITHFUL 


are they/' said Jesus to his disciples on the 
day before his death, ‘'which have continued with me 
in my temptations." They had just been disputing 
among themselves about the question who among them 
was the greatest, quarreling about a matter of prece¬ 
dence as a lot of dukes or as children might; and that 
at the moment when, if they had had the wit to see it, 
Jesus was setting out upon the last miles of the sor¬ 
rowful way that led to the Cross. It was an amaz¬ 
ing exhibition of dulness and triviality in men who 
for three years had lived in intimacy with so rare 
a friend and so rare a teacher as Jesus. In the shad¬ 
ow of coming events, it looked incurably small and 
stupid. But, said Jesus, “ye are they which have con¬ 
tinued with me in my trials." They might be dull, 
they might be trivial, but at least they had been 
faithful. They had continued; so far they had held 
out. 

Not all who had started out with Jesus had done 
that. It is said at one point that many who had been 
with Jesus “turned back and walked with him no 
more;" and there had been probably some deserters all 
the way. Some had set out after Jesus because they 
thought he would lead a movement of revolt and over¬ 
throw the Romans, and that they would come in for 
the spoils; and when they found that that was not the 
program, they went back home. Others had started in 


96 


THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 


a moment of enthusiasm, but had grown weary on the 
way; and still others had come along m^oved with 
curiosity, and had fallen off because it had not proved 
quite as exciting as they had supposed it would be. 
So it had gone on; and the process of sifting had left 
Jesus with a handful of common ordinary folk; and the 
pick of them were these stupid childish men who knew 
no better than to fall to quarreling about their relative 
importance when their Master was girding him^self for 
his last titanic struggle with sin and death. On the 
face of it, the future of the kingdom* was in sorry 
hands if it was to be committed to these inept jealous 
dullards. They lacked the size, they lacked the mind, 
they lacked the insight needed for the task. Yet— 
'‘Ye are they which have continued with me in my 
temptations.’' They mnght be slow-witted; they might 
be crude, the world they lived in might be narrow. 
Yet with all their faults and all their defects, this one 
thing they had. They had been proved to be loyal 
souls. They had not understood everything; they 
were slow to learn; and their Master was often a puzzle 
and a perplexity to them. But they had “continued;'' 
they had not failed him; they had been tried and tested, 
and their metal rang true. 

Jesus indeed knew what he was about. He had 
let the process of sifting go on because he knew that 
for his purposes the quality of his following counted 
for more than the quantity. Men of capacity, able 
men, learned men, rich men, had no doubt been drawn 
to him; but he made no special effort to keep them. 
Not that he despised their ability or their learning, but 
that he knew that ability and learning were poor 


STUPID BUT FAITHFUL 97 

things to face the storms of the world with if they did 
not rest upon a bedrock of character. He knew what 
lay ahead of the men to whom he was cornmitting the 
affairs of his Kingdom; he knew the strain, the tension, 
the hardships that would face them; and so he quietly 
let the popular enthusiasm which he had evoked 
simimer down until it left him vdth this hendful of 
ignorant peasants whom he could trust to go through 
death and hell for his sake when the occasion demianded. 
They w^ere not an imposing comjpany to look at—and a 
tim.e camie when the strongest am^ong themi wobbled. 
But up to this point they had stood the test; and had 
proved that they were likely to stick it cut to the end. 
Before all else, before ability, before learning, before 
intelligence even, Jesus looked for loyalty. And he 
had found it in these mien. 

This raises some vital questions for ourselves. 
Our evaluation of human quality is hardly that of 
Jesus. A man may sacrifice his convictions to his 
comfort, and still be accounted a respectable citizen. 
A man may desert his principles for the sake of power; 
and though we know it we will tolerate him in a position 
of power. Vv^e set a far higher premium than Jesus 
did upon brains, upon miere ability, upon cleverness, 
and a far lower premium upon steadfastness, loyalty 
and faithfulness. Morally the average m.an is stand¬ 
ing on his head and sees the world upside down. The 
wrong things are at the top of his scale. Perhaps 
some day we shall make the astonishing but quite 
simple discovery that it is better for a nation to be 
governed by men of character with little ability than 
by able politicians who sit loosely to mioral principles 


98 


THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 


and who can trim their convictions to the wind. And 
God knows we have too many of that kind about. 

But there is a previous question: How about our¬ 
selves? We did once upon a time pledge our loyalty 
to the Kingdom of Christ; but does it survive? “After 
that many turned back and walked with him no more.” 
We began well, with high spirit and grave intention; 
but the impulse died down. We lost momentum. 
Oh, just the old story, of course; other things came and 
distracted us: the pressure of business, the cares of 
life, rekindled old ambitions, the ancient lures and 
seductions of worldliness. The distance between our¬ 
selves and Christ has grown greater until little remains 
of our first love save a formal lip-service to a name. 
Many of us have done very well for ourselves. We 
have made money; we have gained fame; we have 
gathered power; our names are familiar in the street 
and in the market place. But it has been a costly 
business. We have somehow lost that thing that 
matters when our case comes up in the higher 
courts. 

That fascinating person, “Woodbine Willy” 
(otherwise Mr. Studdert Kennedy, an English clergy¬ 
man who won much merited distinction as a chaplain 
during the war), preaching a little time ago in London 
said, “I am not in the least bit afraid of going to hell; 
but I am horribly afraid that a day may come when 
Some One will look me in the eye and say. Well, and 
what did you make of it?” And what will you or I 
have made of it? Not much, I fear; but at least I 
would wish to be able to say, “I have carried on; I 
have kept the faith. It was not in me to be clever or 


STUPID BUT FAITHFUL 


99 


brilliant or distinguished, to become famous or wealthy, 
but I did what I could. I stuck to my job. I kept 
the flag flyingAnd I have no doubt what the verdict 
would be. For the Lord with whom we have to do sets 
more store upon loyalty than He does upon capacity; 
He sets faithfulness above cleverness. He prefers the 
loyal dullard to the quick-witted weather-cock; so that 
there is a chance for me. 

Grant me, 0 Christ, the grace of a loyalty like thine, 
who having loved thine own that were in the world 
didst love them to the end; and who wert obedient unto 
death, yea the death of the Cross. Enable me to continue; 
to carry my banner through all the changes and chances 
and difficulties of an uncertain life in a treacherous world; 
and bring me to the end of the day without denial or be¬ 
trayal of thy Kingdom in word or thought or deed. 
Amen. 


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THE MYSTERY OF PAIN 


In one of his lectures, John Ruskin deplores the 
wasted time and the wasted emotion of ^The tender and 
delicate women of Christendom’' when they have been 
called ‘Through the four arts of eloquence, music, 
painting and sculpture” to contemplate “the bodily 
pain long passed” of the “Master who is not dead, 
and who is not now fainting under his Cross but is 
requiring us to take up ours.” There is, of course, 
a good deal of justice in this criticism; and a good 
deal of rather weak and vapid sentimentality has 
managed to creep into religion because of the at¬ 
tempt, however well meaning, to exploit the merely 
physical suffering of Jesus for the purpose of stirring 
up emotional reactions which have at bottom noth¬ 
ing to do with religion or any of its aims. The 
true picture that we should see on the Cross is not 
the languishing victim but the conquering hero, and 
his sufferings are not meant to evoke an emotional 
sympathy, but to quicken understanding. 

Now the one truth that shines out like the sun 
from the Cross is that saciifice is the price of all real 
progress, whether of the individual or the race. And 
that progress which is achieved without sacrifice is a 
delusion and a snare. In a dim and hesitating way, 
this was seen by those old religious seekers who said 
that “without the shedding of blood there is no re¬ 
mission of sins.” The peace of God was not to be had 


102 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

without a price, and whatever of good and truth the 
human race has achieved in its long history has been 
achieved at precisely that sanie price, the price of life 
poured forth. Does not Janies Russell Lowell say it 
in words of unforgettable beauty? 

'*By the light of burning heretics, Christ’s bleeding feet I track, 
Toiling up new Calvaries with the Cross that turns not back, 
And these mounts of anguish number how each generation learned 
One new word of that grand Credo which in prophets’ hearts 
has burned, 

Since the first man stood God-conquered, with his face to heaven 
upturned.” 

The Cross is the great historic type of the price that 
has always to be paid for all increase of life, for all 
advance of truth, for all expansions of the area of 
human freedom. The blood of the martyrs is the 
seed of the Church. Our dearest and most prized 
liberties have been won for us in piisons and in jails, 
on the cross and at the stake; and the under-captains 
of our salvation have borne upon them the insignia of 
the Captain-General, they have borne in the body the 
miarks of the Lord Jesus. They have been branded as 
criminals, sold into slavery, driven into exile; but you 
may take it as an established certainty that, wherever 
a righteous man is suffering humanly imposed pains 
and penalties, he is paying the appointed price for 
some living good for which generations yet to come 
will rise and call him blessed. 


“How poor were earth, if all its martyrdoms 

And all its struggling sighs of sacrifice were swept away. 

And all were satiate smooth!” 


THE MYSTERY OF PAIN 


103 


A painless world would indeed be a very poor 
world. 

There are, I think, two mistaken attitudes to 
pain. There is the attitude of those who say that pain 
is an illusion and that we suffer pain because we are, 
as these good people say, in error. Now I think that 
there is an element of truth here which none of us can 
afford to neglect. It mi ay be stated in the form 
of three simple propositions: First, that there is 
a good deal of pain that is illusory; second, that 
the mind is able to exercise a great influence over 
bodily conditions; and third, that the process that is 
sometimes known as auto-suggestion can greatly allev¬ 
iate pain and in some circumstances alleviate it to 
the point of making us insensible of it. But I do not 
see that these three propositions form an adequate 
foundation for a self-contained religious practise, as 
our Christian Science friends appear to think. Yet 
let mie say that in so far as Christian Science dis¬ 
charges a ministry of healing it is doing no little ser¬ 
vice to mankind. And it is certainly recalling us to 
some important truths about ourselves, even if it is 
rather foggy in its ideas about God. 

The second attitude is that which regards pain 
as in some way good in itself. That, I think, is pure 
nonsense. Pain in itself can do nothing but corrode 
and embitter and wear down the spirit and the joy of 
life. But you will find that there has been a school of 
people who have so believed in the redemptive virtue 
of pain that they have gone the length of practising 
and advocating the practise of seH-imposed pain. 
The hair shirt and the spiked bracelet and other prac- 


104 


THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 


tises of asceticism belong to this category. They are 
said to mortify the flesh. But as a matter of fact 
they intensify our sense of the body, for we are never 
so self-conscious, so aware of ourselves, as when we are 
in pain. Any man who has had a toothache knows 
that much. The truth here is I think perfectly plain. 
It is that that condition of the body is most conducive 
to the health, the growth and the freedom of the spirit, 
in which a man is unaware of his body, that perfect bal¬ 
ance of health which has no need to take thought of 
the body. No pain that we can avoid can be of any 
advantage to us. In the Middle Ages there were good 
men and women who were hungering for martyrdom 
and went out to seek it, thinking that there was in it 
an intrinsic virtue that made it a thing to be sought for 
its own sake. Now a readiness for martyrdom is a 
sign of nobility of character; but there is no virtue in 
a martyrdom which a man can avoid, and there is no 
value in pain that a man deliberately imposes upon 
himself. Indeed there is no value at all in any pain in 
itself, except that it may teach us a lesson to avoid 
certain kinds of conduct. We may learn a little wis¬ 
dom by reflecting upon the causes of our pain. But 
apart from that there is no good in it in itself. 

Now the third attitude is that which regards pain 
as a sacrament, as a means whereby we may find God. 
If you ask me why God permits pain I have no simple 
answer to give you. But I do know that He uses 
pain in order to draw us to Himself. There are some 
of us who in the ordinary way of life are so sufficient 
unto ourselves that we would never seek God at all if 
He did not allow us to suffer pain; and those who have 


THE MYSTERY OF PAIN 106 

found Him may find in their pain a road to lead them 
nearer to Him. To cast our pain upon God is to turn 
it into a means of grace, to find a healing of spirit 
which makes us strong to endure the ills of the body. 
This is indeed one aspect of the meaning of the Cross— 
that just as God laid hold of the suffering of His Son 
and hallowed it so that it might become our redemp¬ 
tion, so He will take hold of our pain and hallow it so 
that like His Son we may be made perfect through 
suffering. 

No, pain has its divine ministry if only we will 
turn it God ward. And I am not sure whether there 
is not some suggestion for us healthy and self-sufficient 
people in that little poem of Robert Louis Stevenson, 
“The Celestial Surgeon,'' which we may fitly make our 
prayer: 

“//1 have faltered more or less 
In my great task of happiness; 

If I have moved among my race 
And shown no glorious morning face; 

If beams from happy human eyes 
Have moved me not; if morning skies, 

Books, and my food, and summer rain 
Knocked on my sullen heart in vain — 

Lord, Thy most pointed pleasure take. 

And stab my spirit broad awake. 

Or, Lord, if too obdurate I, 

Choose Thou, before that spirit die, 

A piercing pain, a killing sin. 

And to my dead heart run them in!** 








THE MIND OF CHRIST 


There is a deplorable person among us who de¬ 
scribes himself as a practical man; and we have been too 
ready to accept him at his own valuation. But it is to 
him and his kind that we owe most of the sorrow and 
the trouble that is in the world. Sometimes we call him 
hard-headed, and the tragedy of the man is that his 
head is so hard that reality can not reach his brain. 
There is a practicality which is a competency in hand¬ 
ling affairs, executive and administrative ability and 
the like; this is a gift of the gods, altogether admirable. 
I am not speaking of that, but of the frame of mind 
which says and believes that it always deals with 
facts, and facts only, that does not allow what it calls 
sentiment to interfere with its judgments, that sup¬ 
poses that it takes life and things as it finds them and 
does not suffer itself to be fooled by idealistic flummery. 
If the man is acquainted with the word, he is apt to 
call himself a realist. One meets him in business, but 
he is most at home in politics; and there he has achieved 
something which he has the effrontery to call real- 
politik. 

The word is German, but the thing is every¬ 
where. And it is this same thing that in every age 
strews the face of the earth with death and sends pain 
and heart-break into human lives and human hearts. 
It is the politics of the short view, of the outside view, 
for the trouble with the man is that he sees only the 


108 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

outsides of things and that at short range. He has 
not yet learned that the affairs of men are finally dis¬ 
posed in a region beyond his sight, and that the only 
realistic politics is the politics of the inside view. 

Which means that the only realistic politician 
in the world is the prophet. Mr. G. K. Chesterton 
recently wrote a history of England in which there is 
not a single date. That in the deepest sense is the 
proper way to write history. History is something 
different from a chronicle of events. The chronicle is 
only the raw material of history. Real history is that 
which traces the underlying forces and influences that 
have determined the course of human affairs. And it 
is the peculiar property of the prophet that he is con¬ 
cerned with these hidden powers. That is why he is 
the true historian and the only realistic politician. 
For his concern with events and happenings was to 
discover what they meant. He asked concerning 
this event or that: What does it mean to God? Thom¬ 
as Hardy in his drama, “The Dynasts,” has a device 
by which we are supposed to see through the crust of 
outward happening and to trace the hidden workings 
of the Immanent Will of the Universe. Hardy does 
not, of course, believe that this can be done, but the 
prophet believed it could and went and did it. And 
the thing he saw broke out in flaming words upon his 
lips. The true vision is that which enables us to see 
things suh specie eternitatiSj in their eternal setting, 
in their organic relation to the unseen Ground of 
Life. 

The secret of wisdom is therefore to see life and 
the world as God sees it. And among other things. 


THE MIND OF CHRIST 


109 


probably first of all, to see ourselves as God sees us. 
Robert Burns prayed that some one would 

“the giftie gie us 
To see oorsels as ithers see us,” 

and that were a precious boon. It is good for us to- 
get detached views of ourselves, it saves us from need¬ 
lessly making fools of ourselves. Yet its final result 
may be to make us respectable and dull. Better it is 
to see ourselves as God sees us, and one glimpse of 
that kind would compel most of us to revise our es¬ 
timates of ourselves. It would not make for compos¬ 
ure or self-complacency. Yet the discipline of such a. 
vision is the first step to any abiding inward peace. 
The condition of reaching reality is to get the bare 
net truth about ourselves and to register a just verdict 
on the evidence. That comes when the relentless 
search-light of God has been turned upon us and we 
are stripped bare of the poses with which we deceive 
ourselves and the world. When a man is compelled 
to say, “Lord, thou hast searched me and known me,^^ 
it is the hour of day-break in the soul. 

To get down to a basis of moral realism with 
ourselves, here is the beginning of all realism, the 
ground of all true judgment upon life and things. 
Yet it is but a beginning. And if we are ready for 
the austere discipline of enlarging self-knowledge, our 
dawn will grow to a mid-day fulness of vision. And 
there is much to see that is yet hidden from us. W'e 
shall not only see ourselves but one another in this 
unearthly light; and that is enough to turn the world 
upside down. We shall turn it upon the world and 


110 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

society, upon Church and State, upon peace and war, 
upon commerce and industry, and all that goes to make 
up this bewildering complex that we call Life, and we 
shall see them as they really are. The sum of the 
matter is this: the spiritual man has on his lips whither¬ 
soever he goes the question: What does God think of 
it? What is His mind about it? The only judgment 
that will stand the test of time and upon which it is 
safe to base conduct is that which comes to us when 
the Spirit of God touches our minds and floods them 
with God's light. 

And if to-day we are not seeing the world as God 
sees it, it is not that we do not want to see it, but that 
we are not looking in that direction. We have been 
very busy—making a living, making a fortune, making 
both ends meet, having a good time; we have been too 
busy to look that way, and now that there is a terrific 
urgency that we should see, we hardly know how to 
look. Our eyes have grown dim. We are not aware 
that God is still unveiling His secrets to those who 
have eyes to see; and we have grown content with the 
half-lights of the political theorist, with the twilight 
of the schools, with the facile and anemic twinklings 
of the daily paper. There is nothing for it but to get 
back into the line of vision, to learn the practise of 
the presence of God. That will cost us something, 
but it is cheap at any price. This wisdom is the 
cheapest thing in God's universe, even though a man 
pays for it with the years of his life. For its name is 
^The mind of Christ." 

Thou Light of Life that followest all our way, de¬ 
liver us from the shallow and false judgments that have 


THE MIND OF CHRIST 


111 


left Thee out of the reckoning. Save us from the mislead- 
ing lights of a purblind worldly wisdom; and help us to 
look steadily for the true light in which we shall neither 
stumble in judgment nor go astray, and in which he who 
runs may read, and the wayfaring man though a fool 
need not err. Amen. 



THE SEAMLESS COAT 
I 

Now the coat was without seam, woven from the 
top throughout. 

William James speaks somewhere of ^'our emo¬ 
tional response to the idea of oneness/^ and in a sense 
that has always been the main driving-force of thought. 
On the face of it, the world looks a hotchpotch of 
things, and the thought of it is intolerable. We are 
not satisfied to believe that the world we live in is a 
sort of cross between a department store and a junk- 
shop, and so we are forever trying to discover a coni- 
mon ground upon which all this wild jumble of things 
may stand together as a single ttiing, to find unity be¬ 
neath and through the multiplicity. We want a 
wmverse to live in, a single thing, and not a number of 
things thrown together, a world in which things do 
hang together in some order, on some rational prin¬ 
ciple. It has been the chief concern of thought to 
discover this ground of unity, but it has not found it 
yet. The thinkers are still guessing and arguing 
about it, and it does not seem that they are much 
nearer the goal than Plato was. Omar's complaint 
about them is still not impertinent: 

Myself when young did eagerly frequent 
Master and sage, and heard great argument 
Around it and about; and evermore came out 
By the same door where in I went. 


114 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

Now religion does not argue about this unity; it 
assumes it and goes ahead. It says, ‘‘In the begin¬ 
ning, God,^^ and the rest follows. Of course it is 
possible to build up a very formidable argument 
against this idea of unity: any one of us could do it 
out of the daily paper before going to business in the 
morning. And v/hen the argument is complete. Re¬ 
ligion says, “Yes, all that is perfectly true. There 
is no unity—and yet—and yet, there is.^’ And this 
is the perpetual paradox of religion. This is a world 
in which there is unity, and yet there isn't. Things 
hang together and they don't. In a sense, the whole 
life of religion lies in the business of bridging this con¬ 
tradiction. St. Paul told the Athenians that God had 
made of one all nations of men, and yet later, writing 
to the Ephesians, he says that God purposes to gather 
up these nations, and everything else in heaven and 
earth, into one thing. Plainly there is a unity of 
origin and a unity of destiny; and somiewhere in be¬ 
tween the unity has been lost. And yet there is a 
sort of intermediate unity, for St. Paul tells the Gala¬ 
tians that “there can be neither Jew nor Greek, neither 
bond nor free, there can not be male and female, for 
ye are all one man in Christ Jesus." 

What it seems to come to, then, is this: there is a 
unity to be assumed, a unity to be affirmed and prac¬ 
tised, and a unity to be achieved, a unity which is a 
faith, a unity which is a task, and a unity which is a 
goal. And the task seems to be peculiarly, and to¬ 
day urgently, the task of Christian folk. It is more¬ 
over true that the task begins at home. 

There seems to me to be nothing more pressing 


THE SEAMLESS COAT 


115 


just now than that we should recover a living sense of 
the unity of all life. This should not be difficult, at 
least on some sides. For the evolutionists have really 
done the work for us; and, with the assistance of 
comparative psychology, they have shown us that we 
can not safely draw a frontier-line anywhere, all the 
way up from the amoeba to man, and that life has 
grown imperceptibly from sentiency through conscious¬ 
ness to self-consciousness, and will and personality, 
one single unbroken continuity. The robe is without 
seam, woven from the top throughout. Now so far 
as the conscious and rational life of man is concerned, 
this unity has two aspects. First is the extensive or 
geographical or ethnic side of it. God hath made of 
one all nations of men, and of this the corollary is that 
the real interests of mankind are always and everywhere 
the same. As things are, we order life on the basis of 
presumed rights, claims and aims which are self-re¬ 
garding, and are therefore always potentially and a 
good part of the time actually in conflict. And so 
long as men and classes and nations order their lives 
on the basis of particularist purposes, so long shall we 
have the materials of all sorts of war in the world. 
We have to learn that we are after all one body, 
members one of another, and that one member can 
not suffer but that all the members suffer with it. 
No nation can ultimately prosper by injuring the pros¬ 
perity of another. The adversity of one people is 
the adversity of the whole earth. The garment of life 
is without seam; and the whole garment is injured when 
it is rent or stained in any part of it. 

There is also a psychological side to this unity. 


116 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

And here we have compelled life to discard its seamless 
robe and have grotesquely clad it in a crazy-quilt. 
For we have divided it into compartments, and each 
compartment is a law to itself. There is the compart¬ 
ment of home, the compartment of business, the com¬ 
partment of politics, the compartment of religion, the 
compartment of social intercourse; and each one of 
them is labeled: No connection with the shop next door. 
We have turned the House of Life into an office-build¬ 
ing. We have been sajdng that ''religion has nothing 
to do with politics’^ and "business is business,^^ that 
lying sophistry that has damned so many souls. You 
can not have one code of morals in your home and 
another in your office, one set of sanctions at your 
club and another set at your church. Life can not 
stand that sort of contradiction without petering out. 
It is a sort of yea-and-nay life, a life of facing north- 
by-south-by-east-by-west, a life which cancels out, 
leaving you, if not zero, vertigo. And the worst part 
of this trouble is that religion, which is the special 
guardian of the unity of life, has itself been degraded 
to the status of a mere compartment, which a man can 
attend to or not as he likes, when it should be the 
single spirit that informs the whole of life. A man 
once told me that his wife proposed to attend the church 
of which I was then minister, but that he took his 
recreation in another way. I knew as a matter of 
fact that he worshiped God on the putting-green. 
And so it goes. The king-pin has dropped out of its 
place, and no wonder the rest is chaos. The penalty 
that we are paying for the partition of life is that we 
are living in a reign of mediocrity, with few achieve- 


THE SEAMLESS COAT 


117 


ments in character, in art, or in literature that rise 
above the plane of respectable commonplace. And out 
of this slough we can not be 1 fted except we recover 
once more a vivid sense of the organic unity of all life, 
and discipline ourselves into a way of life that tells 
a single tale, that is attuned in every part of it to one 
clear note. 

But concerning this matter there is more to be 

said. 

0 Thou Father of us all, who art in all and through 
all, whose secret presence runs through creation’s 
veins,” forgive us that we have suffered the seamless robe 
of life to he rent, so that we move about Thy world clad 
in rags and tatters. Help us to see life steadily and to 
see it whole, and deliver us from the folly of dividing up 
that which Thou hast made of one. Give us to dedicate 
ourselves to the great task of bringing all the kingdoms 
of this world into the one kingdom of our God and of His 
Christ. Amen. 


II 

It surely has become a Christian task of the first 
order to attend very seriously to the torn and tat¬ 
tered Church of God. A divided Church can not 
unite the world. Its disunion is more than a re¬ 
proach, it is an apostasy. For it is a denial of its own 
commission. The Church was meant to be a focus and 
organ of unity in a disrupted world. I know that 
there are sound historical reasons for the rise of 
sects. Whenever the Church has overlooked some 
element of Christian truth or neglected some aspect 
of the Christian experience, a body of people has 


118 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

arisen to bear witness to the omitted portion of the 
inheritance. But the Church, being human, treated 
these people as upstarts and either threw or froze them 
out. And so a sect was bom. Then the sect, being 
also human, began to plume itself upon being the sole 
custodian of the tmth, and so was bom that deplor¬ 
able thing, sectarianism. But by this time we have 
boxed the compass of the necessary elements and 
emphases of Christianity and we should be gathering 
them all up into a single complete testimony. The 
hope of a universal Church is unfortunately not even 
in sight. But there are areas within which church 
union has become practical politics. I find it hard to 
understand the mind of a Christian who is not com¬ 
mitted up to the eyes to a program of imion. The 
healing of the dismembered body of Christ is to-day 
of the very marrow of faith. I do not understand how 
a sectarian, the man who hives off with his kind, sup¬ 
poses that he and they are the sole depositories of the 
truth of God and excommunicates the rest of us, can 
claim to rank as a Christian at all. And what effron¬ 
tery, what presumption it is! To suppose that you 
are carrying God’s wide ocean in your own little pail, 
to suppose that you have measured the height and 
depth and length and breadth of the Cross of Christ 
with your own private and arbitrary measuring tape, 
to imagine that there are no stops in God’s organ ex¬ 
cept those on your own little concertina! 

The man for whom Jesus is central, whose hope 
for himself and for the world is in the Cross, is my 
brother in the true catholic faith. I do not care what 
label he wears; he belongs to me and I belong to him 


THE SEAMLESS COAT 


119 


deep down in the spiritual texture of things. His 
theology may not be my theology, but his religion is 
my religion. And religion is greater than theology, 
for religion is life and theology is what we say about 
it. The sectarians are the folk who are dividing his 
garments among them; and for his vesture they cast 
lots. And the robe is without seam, woven from the 
head throughout. Jesus is vaster than all the creeds; 
his gospel is huger and more heroic than our piping 
little preachments, and his Cross outmeasures the 
reach of our minds. Who hath searched the mind of 
the Lord so that he can say that this man or that 
society is outside the covenant? 

For the love of God is broader 

Than the measure of man’s mind; 

and no man, whether he be Pope or Plymouth Broth¬ 
er, can delimit the frontiers of His Church. Jesus came 
to break down the middle-wall of partition between the 
Jew and the Greek; and in doing so he passed sentence 
upon every wall in the world. It is for us to carry out 
the sentence. Let us go to it, with a will. 

And then there is the grave and difficult problem 
of social unity. The evening paper tells me to-day that 
six hundred thousand miners have gone on strike; 
and that is only a symptom of a yawning gulf that 
reaches across the world. In Great Britain no less 
than on this continent society is riven by a chasm deep 
enough for all sorts of tragedy. And the face of 
Europe is streaked with numberless raw gashes. Yet 
the garment was without seam, woven from the top 
throughout. And once more the rags and tatters 


120 


THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 


have to undergo some “invisible mending'^ which 
may make the garment whole again. 

And here the issue is very plain. It is whether 
we are going to cling to that man-in-the-street phil¬ 
osophy which has led us into this trackless wilderness, 
or whether we are ready to try out the Man-on-the- 
cross philosophy at last. So long as we continue to 
order life on the basis of presumed rights, of aims and 
claims which are self-regarding and are therefore 
always potentially in conflict, we shall continue to live 
in a shattered world. It is only when we learn that 
the real interests of men are always and everywhere 
the same that we shall achieve a world worth living in. 

Perhaps some day we shall see that humility is 
the basis of all sound politics and sound religion— 
that humility which is a fastidious self-respect that 
neither suffers nor offers humiliation. Certainly it is 
the very ground of an authentic democratic society. 
For the moment a man exalts himself above his fel¬ 
lows, or lords it over them, or exploits them to his own 
private ends, he is breaking the social bond. The 
man is constituting himself into an aristocracy. And 
democracy is all the time being shot to pieces by the 
pride, the vanity and the self-esteem of men. We shall 
not achieve anything like democracy until we have 
learned the simple truth that capacity is not the 
measure of worth but of obligation, not of the honor 
and glory that we ought to have but of the ser\dce 
that we ought to give. And then we shall not have 
mere democracy, but brotherhood. It is asking much 
of the natural man that he should forego his chance 
of what he calls success by devoting his capacity to 


THE SEAMLESS COAT 


121 


the common weal, indeed it is asking what is beyond 
his capacity without the grace of God. But we shall 
be crying for the moon if we suppose that we can go on 
grinding our own axes and blowing our own trumpets 
and, at the same time, achieve a quiet and fruitful 
life. “The Son of Man came not to be ministered 
unto but to minister”—there is the entire secret. 
When we see and believe that the fulness of manhood 
does lie in becoming a servant we shall have reached 
something that out-democratizes democracy. We 
shall have achieved the Kingdom of God. A far cry, 
you say. All the more reason for an early start. 
But I sometimes fancy that it may be nearer than we 
think. 

Father of Jesus, from whom the whole family in 
earth and in heaven is named, give us the will to 
heal the feuds that rend the family. Make us, we 
pray Thee, in our own lives agents of a healing grace, 
radiating centers of that love which, because it vaunteth 
not itself and is not puffed up, is a virtue of reconcilia¬ 
tion and union. Deliver us from the pride that divides, 
from the self-regard that disrupts, from the vanity that 
breaks our human unity. And let our humility show 
Jorth his grace, who was among us as one meek and 
lowly in heart. Amen. 



THE REDEMPTION OF THE SPORTING IN¬ 
STINCT 

Some years ago, I ventured the remark to a friend 
that the quality that we call sportsmanship was a 
rudimentary form of Christianity. My friend, who 
was a lawyer, disciplined to a literal use of words, very 
devout, but not very imaginative, was very shocked— 
so much so that I began to fear that there was a 
moral kink in my mind; and I have never ventured 
the remark since until now. The idea has been 
again stirred in my mind by the reading of a book 
which I want to refer to presently. And on think¬ 
ing about it, I mean to stick to my guns. For the 
thing that I call sportsmanship is a blending of un¬ 
selfishness and a readiness to take risks, seasoned 
with a dash of chivalry. A young friend of mine 
described a schoolfellow of his to me the other day 
as a sportsman. I needed no other description. 
I know the type—a wholly admirable one. In my foot¬ 
ball days, I remember being told that the mxost brilliant 
Rugby three-quarterback of his day, whom I frequent¬ 
ly saw playing, was not a good sportsman; and the 
explanation followed that he played too much for his 
own hand and did not feed his wing man. Sport has 
fallen on evil days; professionalism and commiercial- 
ization have done it much injury. But the playing 
field has been a good school of character; and this 


124 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

quality of sportsmanship is a priceless thing when it is 
rightly conceived. 

The book to which I referred is 'The Legends of 
Smokeover/' by Dr. L. P. Jacks, principal of Man¬ 
chester College, Oxford, and editor of the Hihhert 
Journaly who combines keen, clear, sane thought 
upon religion and life with an unusual gift of dramatiz¬ 
ation. This is the latest of a series of books of modem 
parables which no man can leave unread and consider 
himself well-educated. Its central figure is a man 
named Rumbelow, who from obscure beginnings be¬ 
came the owner of a coconut-shy, and by keen atten¬ 
tion to business and an adventurous spirit built a 
great gambling business in Smokeover, in which the 
most modern business methods and the most ex¬ 
tensive application of scientific discovery combined 
with world-wide connections enabled you to get 
scientifically calculated odds on any sporting or 
speculation event in the world. When the war came, 
Rumbelow, who from the be^nning seems to have had 
gleams of a larger light, enlisted. He was wounded 
in France and came out of the experience a trans¬ 
figured man. When the war was over, he re-estab¬ 
lished the old business on the old basis and the old 
scale. But with a difference. Before the war it 
existed for the profit and gain of its clients. Now it 
was going to work for the redemption of the world. 
And when the firm was ready to start, there was a great 
banquet at which Rumbelow announced the policy 
and the motto of the business: Ideal A.i7Yis, Business^ 
like Methods, Sportsmanlike Principles. 

The main idea of the book is the creation of the 


REDEMPTION OF THE SPORTING INSTINCT 126 

moral will. Such a thing has not yet existed, for no 
single individual can possess it. It can only exist in 
a group of interpenetrating personalities; for only 
under those conditions can you effect a genuine syn¬ 
thesis of ideal aims, businesslike methods, sportsman¬ 
like principles. As things are these do exist, in various’ 
inadequate combinations, and consequently they 
miscarry. When you have the businesslike methods 
and the sportsmanlike principles without the ideal 
aims, you produce the original Rumbelow, a center of* 
corruption and degeneracy. When you have the ideal 
aims and the sporting principles without the business¬ 
like methods you have your Gandhis and other dreamers' 
whose dreams miscarry into failure and waste. And 
when you have your ideal aim.s and businesslike meth¬ 
ods without the sporting principles, you create your 
Pharisees and other guardians of encrusted religions 
and standardized moralities. I think that we have 
here the real motto for churches. W’^e have the ideal 
aims—nothing less than the Kingdom of God. But 
we modern Christians have little more. If only we 
could harness our ideal aims to the best methods of 
modern business—system, the m^ethodical utilization 
of science, the elimination of waste and overlapping,, 
of slovenliness and casualness, a rational distribution 
of labor—and to the sportsmanlike principle—the 
readiness to take risks, the willingness to accept haz¬ 
ards, to give our hostages to the future—and then 
go gaily ahead, God alone knows what we might not 
accomplish. 

Some one should write a book on the revelation of' 
God in modern business. Mr. Roger Babson has 


126 


THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 


caught a glimpse of the idea. But he mixes it up with 
the dangerous idea that it pays to be godly. I imagine 
that we could find out a good deal of truth about one 
aspect of the mind of God if we studied the methods 
of some of the leaders of modern business. For 
after all, as St. Paul says, “God is not a God of con¬ 
fusion,^' and so, he adds, “let all things be done de¬ 
cently and in order," which, being intei’preted, means. 
Be businesslike. But it is the sporting instinct that I 
am chiefly interested in at the moment. The preva¬ 
lence of the gambling habit in every age and among 
all classes seem^s to indicate that there is an attraction 
for human nature in the risk quite apart frona the 
profit that it may offer. You can see the same thing 
in the risks that men take in mountain-climbing and 
in other forms of sport and action. The human con¬ 
quest of sea and air is a triumph of the sportsmanlike 
principle applied to science. Human nature on the 
whole appears to prefer the uncertain to the certain. 
And this seems to be ingrained in the very texture of 
life itself. Mr. Bernard Shaw tells us that the impulse 
of life has “struggled with m^atter and circumstance 
by the method of trial and error;" and M. Bergson 
says that in the evolution of life those forms have miade 
the greatest successes that have taken the greatest 
risks. The sportsmanlike principle springs from the 
nature of things. And at its highest, it is, as our book 
says, “another name for the high romance of the spirit; 
it marks the point at which Law turns into Love, and 
the prose of life becomes poetry, and the music begins." 
It is the raw material of faith, and without it we 
■remain static and motionless. “Unless," says Rumbe- 


H REDEMPTION OF THE SPORTING INSTINCT 127 

low, “our courage can take the risk of being in the 
wrong, we shall never find ourselves in the right. 
Every great principle gambles with the risk of its 
misapplication; and for that reason every moral 
enterprise turns out to be a sporting proposition.'^ 
“To die," says Peter Pan in the play, “will be a great 
adventure." Maybe; but what an adventure life 
itself might be if we only began to live! 

Spirit of LifOy we confess before thee that we have 
been cowardly and faint of heart. We have shrunk from 
the great adventure of faith and lovey and have run to 
cover when thou hast hidden us flare forth into the dark. 
We have loved to linger in the comfortable security of 
creed and legalityy and have feared to face the call of life. 
Forgive uSy we humbly beseech theCy and help us to do 
better, to dare more, and always to remember that it is 
nowise safe to refuse to take the risk of doing thy will. 
Amen. 


\ 




1 


\ 

< 

I 


• < 




PESSIMISM AND PENTECOST 

I 

A little time ago I fell into conversation with a 
man in the train and the talk drifted to the present 
state of the world. ''Well/^ said the man, '^so far as I 
am concerned, I am through with it. I now just come 
in to business and go back home again as soon as I can, 
to my books and my chickens, and forget it.'^ Just 
about the same time, I read an article in an English 
paper dealing with a tendency among men of good-will 
to withdraw from public life in disgust and despair. 
While I refuse to share this feeling, I think that I can 
understand it. Few sensitive souls can stand the 
daily impact of the morning paper just now without a 
very definite depression of spirit. The evil in the world 
seems so persistent, so tangled, that it is easy to decline 
into the deadly opinion that it is incurable. And it is 
no wonder that souls of more than average sensibility 
wonder whether It is any use to struggle to redeem it. 
It is just such a time as in other ages might have 
started a great exodus into the wilderness and the 
solitary place, in the desperate hope that there a man 
might at least save his soul alive from the spiritual 
and m-oral desolation of humian society. All the sarnie, 
this is quitting the job. And upon that point the 
last word was said long ago. In the procession of 
lost souls that the writer of the Apocalypse sees 
making its way to the second death, the fearful and the 


130 


THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 


faithless lead the way. There is more than one 
unpardonable sin, and quitting is one of them. 

I am persuaded that the main cause of this tend¬ 
ency to pessimism lies in fatigue. My observation 
leads me to think that we are all a good deal more 
tired just now than we think we are. The strain of 
the war, the anxieties of the post-war penod, the 
difficulties of domestic and business life, the general 
dislocation of things, and the tangle 1 task of readjust¬ 
ment—all these things have entailed a strain upon our 
minds that has disabled us from thinking lucidly or 
even from presenting a normal resistance to the small 
contrary winds of the day’s work. And as yet we have 
had no relief from this harassment. We have gone to 
bed with it and we have found it with us in the morn¬ 
ing—a dull nagging sense of doubt and misgiving. 
It has invaded our vacations and largely nullified 
them. And deep within our souls there is a longing 
for a space of quiet, for a moment of respite for our 
tired and sagging minds. I am inclined to think that 
if we could all take a week’s holiday at the same time— 
all of us, and especially those of us who live in public, 
presidents, prime ministers, politicians, journalists, 
preachers—if we said nothing more than pass the 
time of day, and did no more than take our meals, the 
air of the world would become perceptibly cleaner, we 
should all think more clearly, and many public prob¬ 
lems (and private ones too, for that matter) would 
solve themselves. The world to-day is being governed, 
its thought directed, its affairs managed, by men with 
tired minds. And a good deal of its trouble arises 
from that cause. 



PESSIMISM AND PENTECOST 


131 


What we need is reinforcement, a renewal of 
energy, a new infusion of vitality. And in this con¬ 
nection I would like to remark upon two matters of 
some importance. The first has to do with the im¬ 
portance of rest. Modern psychology insists that even 
bodily fatigue is chiefly an affair of the mind, and that 
our minds are in greater need of rest than our bodies. 
There can be no doubt that systematic rest is a condi¬ 
tion not only of effectual resistance to depressing 
circumstances but also of any kind of good work. The 
psychologist virtually reverses our customary doctrine 
of rest—the time for rest is not after work but before 
it. 

Our trouble seems to be that we have lost our 
capacity for rest; our main characteristic is our rest¬ 
lessness, and it is we who have coined the fatuous say¬ 
ing that the best rest is a change of work. The only 
real rest is in a space of quiescence, of inactivity; and 
we are not going to be what we might or to do the best 
work of which we are capable until we have lear*ned the 
art of doing nothing at all. Some little oasis of peace 
and tranquillity we must stake out for ourselves amid 
the clamorous business of the day if we are to resist 
successfully the wear and tear, the weariness and ex¬ 
haustion, of life in such a world as this. Yesterday, 
life followed the stagecoach; to-day the automobile 
sets the pace. And we can only survive this new ve¬ 
locity by pegging out a little bit of every day when 
our minds and bodies may relax and renew our 
strength. 

The second matter has to do with our unutilized 
resources. Here, as in regard to rest, I am not repeat- 


132 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

ing general speculations but conclusions drawn ex- 
perinientally from observed facts. It seems certain 
that we have reserves of bodily strength far beyond 
those we normally call up in our most strenuous en¬ 
deavors. Under the stimulation of our instinctive 
emotions, these reserves come into action and enable 
us to perform feats of endurance and strength which 
we should otherwise declare to be beyond us. This 
is even truer of our minds. Most of us have had ex¬ 
perience of moments of urgency in which we have 
thought with a miraculous lucidity and have acted 
and spoken with a power and a clarity unusual to us. 
The bare truth is that we are keeping most of our 
powers in ‘'cold storage,'' and we should be devising 
somxe method of getting them into the market of life. 
And even at our lowest moments we may take heart of 
grace from the reflection that we have in the bank of 
the subconscious incalculable reserves which stand 
between us and the mental insolvency that breeds de¬ 
spair and surrender. 

It is significant that some psychologists are very 
much engaged just now in the task of discovering ways 
in which we may capitalize our dormant reserves. 
There is for instance Dr. Coue, and the Nancy School. 
Now Dr. Coue's prescription is our old friend auto¬ 
suggestion in a new better-tailored suit. And virtually 
it comes to this: You are to take yourself in hand in 
the few minutes before you drop off to sleep at night 
and when you wake up in the morning, when your 
mind is semi-comatose and therefore abnormally im¬ 
pressionable, and say to yourself very deliberately and 
solemnly twenty timies a formula like this: Every day 


PESSIMISM AND PENTECOST 


133 


and in every respect, I am growing better and better. 
Or if you have some special frailty, a brittle temper, 
for instance, you modify the formula accordingly. 
Now for people who can do this kind of thing, I think 
there is real value in it. But for myself it is, I confess, 
useless. I have tried it, and I found an ironic sprite 
up my sleeve sniggering at me. “You are trying,” it 
seemed to say, “to bluff yourself into being a fine fel¬ 
low. Come down and get to work.” And seriously, I 
find that I am not particularly interested in becoming 
better and better—it sounds rather tame, like an old- 
fashioned Sunday school book—unless I can read my 
own content into the word “better.” What I want is 
more spiritual strength, more moral courage, more in¬ 
tellectual lucidity, more creative energj^ more per¬ 
suasive speech; indeed when I begin to list the things 
that my frailty needs, I know beyond a peradventure 
that I want a great deal more than I am ever likely 
to get by telling uiyself when I am half-asleep that I 
am getting it. 

I shall have to look elsewhere for my reinforce¬ 
ment, but I shall have to consider this matter next 
week. 

Lord God, who hast ordained us to great under¬ 
takings, we know that Thou wilt not leave us powerless. 
And our impotency to-day is our own most grievous 
fault. For Thou dost ever send Thy Spirit to all that 
wait upon Thy promise. Forgive us that we ham ignored 
the uppper room and have forgotten the springs, A.nd 
once more lead us to the places where Thy Spirit dwelleth 
and where Thou givest him without measure to them who 
are willing to receive him. Amen, 


134 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

II 

The thing that chiefly strikes me when I look upon 
the Christians of the Apostolic Age is their sense of 
adequacy for a great task. They had been appointed 
to an enormous undertaking and they felt equal to it. 
I marvel (for instance) at the self-possession of the 
little company of Christians at Antioch who looked 
out upon the heathen wastes of the Western World 
and dared to dream the amazing impossible dream of 
transforming the empire of Caesar into the empire 
of Christ, and then with a still more astonishing hardi¬ 
hood sending out two of their number to make the 
dream come true. And when we remember who they 
were, how not many wise after the flesh, not many 
mighty, not many noble were there, but a handful 
of small tradesmen, artisans, slaves and others of no 
account, the wonder increases. 

And then one thinks of Saint Paul, with his pa¬ 
tience, his power of endurance, his courage, his spirit 
of enterprise, with eyes looking ever afield for new 
worlds to conquer (you remember how even before 
he set foot on Italy, he was planning to go on to Spain). 
Here we have indeed not the measure of a man only, 
but the temper of a generation. For Paul was not, by 
a good deal, the only man of his time who possessed 
this strength, this daring, this spirit of adventure. 
It was the common possession of the whole Christian 
society. 

There have been other passages in the history of 
the Church which were marked by these qualities of 
boldness and strength; but plainly this is not one of 
them. The Church to-day seems tired, spent; it has 


PESSIMISM AND PENTECOST 


136 


settled down to a pedestrian gait and does not seem 
able to shake itself out of it. There is no fire in its 
eye, no spring in its step, no confidence on its lips. 
We sing “Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to 
war,'’ but we do not look like it. The last thing we 
suggest is something “terrible as an army with ban¬ 
ners!” We hardly can turn a hair upon the head of 
the man in the street, who passes us by as though we 
were not there. It is time that we tried to recover 
the secret of the primitive Church. 

In my last paper, I tried to point out that we had 
great unused reserves of power within us, and that 
what we need is to have these called up and harnessed 
to the business of life. And it was that experience 
that the first Christians went through with a peculiar 
intensity in that episode that we call Pentecost. There 
is no doubt that they did pass through an experience 
that transfigured them. They were called to an 
immense task, before which an army of strong men 
might have quailed. They were a little company in 
the midst of an unfriendly world. They had been set 
to win that same unfriendly world into the kingdom of 
Christ. They accepted the task without fear and 
went about it with confidence. In capacity, they were 
not singular; in education, they were as a whole beneath 
the average of their time; in social standing they were 
contemptible. They were handicapped by a fact 
of inadequacy much greater than any we suffer from, 
- yet they had no sense of it. And if they could over¬ 
come such inadequacy, much more should we, and the 
miore our shame if we do not. What was their secret? 

Well, we can hardly ask the question without 


136 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

hearing the answer, echoing down the ages in a voice 
strangely familiar: Ye shall receive power after that 
the Holy Ghost is come upon you. And it was that 
that happened on the day of Pentecost. I shall have 
to give another paper to the events of that day. 
Here I want to consider—shall I call it?—the psy¬ 
chology of the experience. 

Somebody has said that the human mind backs 
on infinity. For myself I prefer to say the same thing 
in another way. The human soul reaches endlessly 
inward until at last it touches God. Within this 
uncharted region which we call the sub-conscious 
(or if you prefer the more fashionable term just now, 
the unconscious) are laid up the unutilized reserves of 
which I have already spoken, strange potencies that 
surge and heave restlessly and obscurely within me. 
But these remain there unused because there is no 
force from behind to drive them into the daylight. 
At that point where my spirit touches God, the channel 
is clogged by my selfishness and greed, by my lack of 
prayer and the cares of this world, and a hundred 
other dark obstructions that I have unwittingly al¬ 
lowed to sink into the depths of my spirit. But those 
people stayed in their upper room until prayer and 
faith and expectancy had purged their souls of every 
hindering thing and the boundless life of God cam.e 
fiooding their own. And it brought out with it every 
latent power of perception and imagination and ex¬ 
pression that had waited for its release in their souls. 
They received a reinforcement of mind and heart and 
will. Vision and love and resolution were quickened 
within them. Their cup of life was running over; and 


PESSIMISM AND PENTECOST 


137 


they had to go out into the streets of the city to share 
their abundance with any rnan who was not unwilling 
to receive it. 

It was the greatest experience of their life; and 
when it comes to us it will be the greatest experience of 
ours. There is awaiting us an undreamed-of exaltation 
of spirit, a replenishing of all our powers, an expansion 
of our soul, an assurance of real adequacy for the 
exacting task of life in a ruined and shattered world. 
The psychologists may call it an uprush from the sub¬ 
conscious; let them call it what they will. It is the 
dMne life invading ours, and bringing with it a new 
scale of life, an enhancement of personality, a different 
quality and dimension of consciousness and power. 
The materials of it are here within us; it is the task of 
the Spirit to liberate these materials and make them 
available for the business of life. The only cure for 
fatigue and pessimism and despair, the one secret of 
the abundant creative energy that we need to-day, 
is another Pentecost; and it is the mark of the wise 
man to expect it and to get ready for it. 

0 Thou who didst send Thy Spirit to Thy servants 
who waited in the upper room, show unto us an upper 
room where we may also tarry until we are filled with 
power from on high. Our tasks are heavy and our burdens 
are great, and we are not sufficient for them. But only 
grant us this gift and we shall he able to do all things 
through Him that loved us: and nothing shall dismay us 
or be impossible unto us. Amen. 




THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH 


When we speak of the coming of the Spirit, we are 
apt to think of it as an experience superimposed upon 
life. We have grievously confused our thinking upon 
this as upon many other things by overstressed and un¬ 
real distinctions between natural and spiritual, as 
though the spiritual were unnatural. There is no such 
thing as supernatural, if we understand the term nature 
aright. The natural and the spiritual are one in the 
unity of life. The spiritual life is the natural life 
raised to a higher Power, to a higher scale, to a new 
intensity. It is a springtide of life that touches a 
new high-water mark. But there is no real break 
between the natural and the spiritual. Whsii we call 
the life of the spirit belongs to the nature of things, 
and the passage from natural to spiritual is as natural 
as that from childhood into adolescence and from 
adolescence to maturity. But the passage has to be 
made, the unseen Rubicon crossed, if ever we are to 
attain to the fulness of life. 

It is said in the Fourth Gospel that the Spirit 
guides us into all the truth. And this supplies us with 
a good instance of the way in which the Spirit affects 
our life. There are none of our natural faculties that 
are incapable of education, of extension, of being 
made far more sensitive and efficient than they 
actually are. For instance, if you go for a walk in the 
country with a landscape painter, you will discover 


140 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

that he sees tints and tones that escape you. I read a 
little time ago how in the course of recent centuries 
the musical ear has been sensitized to perceive ever 
shorter intervals of sound. This is of course largely a 
matter of practise and use; and it is undoubtedly true 
that few of us ever learn to use our faculties to the full 
range of their capacity. Now the coming of the Spirit 
entails a quite definite increment of power and scope 
to our faculties; and the increment is of that peculiar 
quality which enables the artist to see not only unac- 
custouied tones and colors, but everything luminous 
and afire with God, and the musician to hear not per¬ 
mutations and combinations of sounds only, but the 
echoing music of the spheres. The Spirit extends, 
sharpens, sensitizes our faculties of perception, so that 
we see not only objects of sense miore truly, but through 
them the deep things of God. 

And among the rest, it reinforces reason. It 
makes it surer, more efficient, miOre instant in its 
operations. For it unveils to it a rationality deeper 
and more assured than the rationality of a short-length 
logical process. There is a narrow hard-faced ration¬ 
ality abroad which is well-spoken of by some people— 
they presume to call it practicality—which can cal¬ 
culate very shrewdly the chances of the game two or 
three moves ahead, but which ends in sloughs and 
quagmires and causes the ultimate business of life to 
miscarry. But the spirit-informed reason has a long- 
range rationality, which sees things in their deeper, 
more fundamental relations—sees them, that is, not 
in their relations to one another in time and space only, 
but against their eternal background—and so reaches 


THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH 


1411 


judgments that are sounder and more solid than those' 
of your presumed '"practical” mi.an. 

The intuition and instinctive powers are rein¬ 
forced in the same way. It has been said that reason 
is valid only in the realm of causation, that is, in the 
region of causes and effects; and that for the ascer¬ 
tainment of truth in respect of beauty, affection, and 
other precious things that go to make up life, other 
organs are required. This is the field of intuition; 
and the faculties that have to do with it are not yet 
fully understood. Yet they are in us—the sources of 
those swift flashes of insight, those sudden unbidden 
perceptions, those unexpected, unheralded assurances,, 
those calls and constraints of duty which constitute 
the greater part of life. We do not know much about 
their working, but they are in some sort receiving 
instruments by which wireless inform^ation reaches the 
soul. And these organs of perception are so sensitized 
by the incoming of the spirit that we are enabled to 
receive direct m^essages fromi beyond the bounds of 
time and space which bear upon them the authentic- 
word of God. 

There is another fact to be remem^bered in this 
connection. "Religion was born in fellowship,” said 
George Meredith; and it is no less true that fellowship- 
is a condition of a sound and sure perception of truth.. 
It is only by comparing notes, by pooling our experi¬ 
ences, that we can correct the bias and the exaggera¬ 
tions which spring from our personal idiosjmcrasies. 
Any one who has sat through the evidence in a court , 
of law knows that the event as a particular witness 
observed it is never quite the event that happened;. 


142 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

and the truth as it is is never quite the same thing as 
the truth as I see it. We have to make common cause 
in the great inquiry if we are to avoid eccentricity of 
belief or behavior. The solitary unattached believer 
becomes a religious crank. But fellowship may, like 
our mental faculties, be raised to a higher power. 
And that was probably the supreme gift of the Spirit 
at Pentecost. A new quality of fellowship was de¬ 
veloped, something vastly profounder and more or¬ 
ganic than the fellowship we achieve upon the secular 
plane—the fellowship which became the Church, but 
which the modern Church hardly knows. And this 
spirit-created fellowship is the supreme organ for the 
discovery of the truth. A new whole is created which 
adds something to the stature and the power of the 
individuals who constitute it. We have yet to explore 
the psychology of fellowship—the psychology of the 
crowd we have to some extent understood, but that is 
another story—and most of all do we need to pene¬ 
trate the meaning of that deep word: '‘Where two or 
three are gathered together in My name, there am I 
in the midst of them.'' For in the spirit-informed 
fellowship there is always a super-presence, a subtle 
but intensely real Something or Somebody that brings 
a gift of light that never was on land or sea, in which 
we see rare things that are hidden from sense. I know 
a little group of people who hold that truth is found by 
•hard thinking and hard praying in fellowship—and T 
believe they are right. Does not St. Paul say that it 
is with all the saints that we are to apprehend the 
height and depth, the length and breadth, and to know 
the love of Christ which passeth knowledge? 




THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH 


143 


Now in all this we have the conditions of that 
supreme experience that we call revelation. Concerning 
this great matter we shall try to think in the next paper. 

0 Spirit of Truth, we who are so easily persuaded 
that man can live by bread alone and that man’s life 
consists in the multitude of the things he possesses, desire 
Thee to show us the things that are unseen and eternal. 
Reveal to us that quality of Ldfe which is hidden with 
Christ in God, and give us a vivid experience of that life 
so that we may be weaned from all desire save for the 
word that cometh forth from the mouth of God, which is 
the truth that shall make us free. Amen, 


1 


*. • 


THE PRICE OF REVELATION . 

Have you ever attempted to read any of the great 
mystics, Jacob Boehme, for instance, or the English¬ 
man, Richard Rolle of Hampole, or the Lady Julian of 
Norwich? If you have, you have discovered how little 
plain sense quite plain language can sometimes convey. 
You may read page after page and encounter no single 
word to which you are a stranger, yet somehow you 
feel that the meaning has escaped you. The reason is 
this. The people who teach us logic have a good deal 
to say about the ''universe of discourse.'^ If people are 
to talk to each other intelligently they m.ust be in the 
same universe of discourse. Thej^ must be thinking 
about the same things; they must use the same terms 
in the same sense; they must be inhabiting the same 
circle of ideas. Otherwise their mJnds will not mieet; 
they will be at cross-purposes and will not understand 
one another. You do not expect an average farm 
laborer to understand “The Ring and the Book.'' 
Nor would you expect a theological student to m^ake 
much of the last work upon therapeutics. The uni¬ 
verse of discoume is different. And that is why the 
mystics leave us dazed and bewildered; and why we 
understand so little even of the Fourth Gospel and 
the Pauline writings. These are the utterances of 
people who dwell in a universe of discourse other 
than that we habitually reside in, where the idiom is 
different and common words become charged with 


146 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

unaccustomed meanings. The mind is not working 
upon the rule of a man-made logic, and the whole 
matter moves on a plane on which we men and women 
of ordinary clay are plainly not at home. They are 
seeing things beyond our sight, hearing things beyond 
our hearing, and so they use a speech which is beyond 
our intelligence. Now, the door by v/hich they en¬ 
tered this strange and unfamiliar world is Pentecost. 
They gained the franchise of the invisible in some upper 
room. 

One of our commonest mistakes is to think of 
Pentecost as a historical event, a strange happening 
which befell on a summer day in an upper room. This 
is indeed the mistake that we make about all the great 
acts of God in human history. For us the Passover is 
only an old story of how a small community of serfs 
made a romantic escape from servitude, as though it 
were not a story which every soul has to live over again 
if it is to gain the liberty of the children of God. Some 
of you will perhaps recall the story of Ian Maclaren in 
which he describes the trembling aspirant for church 
membership. The Kirk Session asked her: “And 
have you been to Sinai?” They understood better 
than we that the soul has comm^only to pass by Mount 
Sinai before it reaches the Promised L^nd of Peace. 
We give a date and a place to the Cross as though the 
Cross were not eternal, to be endured by every faith¬ 
ful soul in a crooked and evil world. And so it is 
with Pentecost. It is the historical prototype of what 
should be a common and constant experience among 
men. A man’s Pentecost is the day when he ex¬ 
changes blindness for sight, when he breaks through 


THE PRICE OF REVELATION 


147 


the crust of outward appearance and catches his first 
glimpse of reality. It is when he breaks loose from the 
bonds of sense and strides forth into the free country 
of the Spirit: it is the day when he ceases to live 
on the outsides of things and finds a home at their 
flaming heart, which is the heart of God. 

Let me give you a little illustration of this great 
thing. For a good many years, I was a Peter Bell 
among pictures. To me they were so many painted 
things on canvas, and all I knew was that I liked them 
or did not like them. I read books upon Art; I tried 
to master the theory of technique and composition. 
I studied what had been written of the various schools 
of painting. But I could get no farther. The wretch¬ 
ed things would say nothing to me; and I had pretty 
well given up hope that they ever would. But one 
day I was going through the pictures in the Louvre 
at Paris, and I came upon a group of pictures by a 
certain painter. And as I stood looking at these, 
something happened. I realized that I was seeing a 
picture and that I had never seen one before. It said 
things to me that I could at least dimly understand; 
my eyes had been opened. I had entered within the 
veil. I ceased from that moment to be the utter out¬ 
sider that had been—not indeed that I have ever gone 
much farther into the secret, but I had crossed the 
bounds. 

It was after all a very little new world that I had 
entered into, a very small and narrow universe— 
though the universe of Art is the greatest and finest of 
all the universes that God has enabled human faculty 
to create. Nor can I give any very lucid account of 


148 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

what happened save that I was knocking at a door 
and the door opened to me. And I managed to creep 
in a very little way. Yet it is a true and valid parable 
of a very much greater thing that may happen to all 
of us, of the opening of a more wonderful door. They 
were knocking at the door—those people in the upper 
room—had been knocking patiently for many days, 
and at last it was opened imto them. And we with 
our topsy-turvy sense of proportion think that the 
most wonderful thing that happened was that these 
people rushed out into the streets of Jerusalem and 
swept the city with a torrential and many-tongued 
eloquence. That was startling, no doubt. But it 
was the least thing that had happened on that day. 
It was the most dramatic and spectacular part of the 
affair. But what was of greatest consequence was 
this: that a company of com^mon folk had by their 
persistent besieging broken through and reached the 
burning heart of reality and had caught its fire. They 
were not the same men and women after that. They 
saw new things with new eyes, they heard new things 
with new ears. They had rent the veil that hides the 
unseen from us on the common ways of life. And this 
is an experience that all men may share. Call it what 
you will—spiritual illumination, the Baptism of the 
Spirit; but the name matters little. What I want to 
say is that you will not niiss it if you will pay the price 
of faithful patient seeking. The door is bound to be 
opened to your knocking, the veil is boimd to yield to 
your assailing—^this invisible kingdom is there at 
your hand. And we miss it simply because we do 
not seek it, perhaps do not want it— 


THE PRICE OF REVELATION 


149 


The drift of pinions, could we hearken, 

Beats at our clay-shuttered doors. 

But our habit of thought rises no higher than money¬ 
making, pot-hunting, muck-raking, seeking for the 
immediate concrete satisfactions that the world of 
sense can afford us; and yet here in very truth, nearer 
to us than breathing, closer than hands and feet, is un¬ 
told splendor of light, unimagined depth of understand¬ 
ing, that world which once seen is recognized to be 
reality, and transfigures this world of things into a 
Bethel, the House of God, the very Gate of Heaven. 

I wonder whether I am speaking intelligibly—I 
confess that I find it to be beyond my power to say 
the plain convincing word about this thing that I 
would. But that I speak of it so lamely does not alter 
the truth of it. And difficult as it may be to give an 
account of it, there is yet no obscurity about the way 
of reaching it. It is an old word but it comes from one 
who had a right to say it, “Seek and ye shall find, 
knock and it shall be opened unto you.’' It maybe that 
we seem to ask for it without understanding what it is 
that we ask for. But that is of no account. Pay the price 
of lowliness and faithfulness, and you will reach it. No 
knowledge, no culture, no learning, can of itself bring 
us into it, though he who has these has the advantage 
when he has gained the heavenly vision. It will be the 
richer and the more luminous to him whose mind is 
agile and well-stored. But whether we know much or 
little, we must be content to be taken by the hand 
by the Spirit of God. It is the treasure of the humble, 
the reward of the seeker, the prize of the faithful, the 
gift of God given without money and without price. 


150 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

S'pirit of God, forgive us the heavy pride that befools 
us into thinking that we can do without Thy light, We 
have gone our own way, self-sufficient and self-satisfied, 
and we have wandered into trackless places and found 
only emptiness and darkness. We have tried to conduct 
life by the light of nature only to discover ourselves frus¬ 
trated and undone. Give us the lowliness that will wel¬ 
come thy Ldght, And in Thy Light may we see Light, 
that Light that never was on land or sea. 


THE ROAD 


Have you ever felt the romance of the Road? The 
history of civilization is the history of roads. To write 
the story of a few of the great highways of the world 
would be to tell the gist of our whole human story; and 
there is nothing deeper in human nature than the road¬ 
making impulse. For the use of a road is to bring 
people together; and there is no great modern invention 
which is not in a sense an extension of the road-idea. 
The railroad is a development of the cartroad; the 
steamboat has turned the sea into a highroad; and the 
flying machine has carried the business of roadmaking 
up into the air. The telegraph and the telephone also 
are simply elaborations of the road principle; and the 
automobile has done no more than add to the possibili¬ 
ties and importance of the road. The great achieve¬ 
ment of Mr. Henry Ford is not a miracle of standard¬ 
ization, but the fact that his car has socialized the 
Western farmer’s life. He has brought them that were 
afar off near. Even the direction in which a road runs 
has had important consequences for history. It has 
been said that the Civil War might never have hap¬ 
pened if the main railroads of the country had run 
north and south instead of east and west; and that may 
well be true. Some one has said that he did not care 
who made a nation’s laws so long as he made its songs; 
but a nation’s roads are as important as its songs. 

For the road is the symbol of unity, the organ of 


152 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

a common life. Even though a railroad be built for pur¬ 
poses of trade or as a mere speculative adventure, it 
has a spiritual significance far beyond its original in¬ 
tention. For it brings people together and starts all 
sorts of social ferments. Though we build it to carry 
merchandise, we can not prevent its carrying ideas. 
You may establish a telephone system as a business 
venture; but it is not only profits into your pockets 
that it carries; it carries thoughts and emotions—the 
veiy stuff of life itself. And in the end the thing that 
matters to a nation is not the mobilization of its 
commodities, but the mobilization of ideas, thoughts, 
feelings, hopes, knowledge—the mobilization of its 
life-stuff. A road may be a useful thing; but we do 
not understand what a road truly is unless we see it 
also as a sacramental thing. And because this coming 
together, this law of unity and fellowship, has been 
written in our natures by God, every road in the world 
is in a real sense a highway for our God. 

The first road that ever was made was the invisible 
road by which one soul reached another. And every 
other road in the world is an extension of that primor¬ 
dial road. These unseen spiritual roads v/hich con¬ 
nect you and me are the most important thing in life. 
Friendship is such a road, carrying the most precious 
merchandise in the world; and it is the duty of every 
man to build these roads, to multiply and strengthen 
his social contacts. On a small scale, we all do it, of 
course; but we do it in a selective way. The roads we 
commonly make do not reach beyond the neighborhood 
of our own class, our own clique, our own set; but the 
time calls for roads that cross these narrow frontiers 


THE ROAD 


153 


into the great human regions beyond. There is 
nothing so disastrous to the democratic ideal as these 
class-frontiers; and democracy itself will wilt and die 
unless we overcome them, unless we build broad and 
generous roads that will extend the commerce of 
souls throughout the whole community. The social 
organization which, like ours, has bred a privileged 
class of gilded parasites on the one hand and on , the 
other a helot class condemned in perpetuity to do the 
menial work of the rest of us is involved in the danger 
of wild disruption all the time; and somehow or other 
v/e must overcome this evil and deadly classification. 
If democracy is to live we must learn the art of com¬ 
radeship, comradeship broad enough and humble 
enough to embrace the street cleaner and the colored 
man—not mere sentimental lip-service to the ideal of 
brotherhood but a comradeship which can be trans¬ 
lated into concrete policies of mutual service and co¬ 
operation, a comradeship rich in the exchanges of 
friendship and good-will. 

And beside these local roads, there is a great trunk 
road to be built, which will sweep through the unre¬ 
deemed tracks of human life and bring them all into a 
new and undreamed-of unity, into a single order of 
life and freedom, wide as mankind itself. If Isaiah 
were alive to-day, he would preach to us the great 
sermon he once preached in Babylon: “Prepare ye the 
way of the Lord; make straight in the desert a high¬ 
way for our God.'' For that truly is the way of the 
Lord that will build the families of men into a single 
family of God. Every hill must be laid low, and every 
valley filled up, that the road may be straight—the 


154 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

hills of economic rivalry and the valleys of prejudice, 
the hills of perverse national ambitions, the valleys 
of ignorance and contempt, those frontiers of sentiment 
that have been more divisive than the frontiers of 
geography, all these must go, that the road may be 
free and unencumbered for all the traffic of the world. 
And the name of this road is Reciprocity—reciprocity 
in trade, reciprocity in ideas, reciprocity in culture, 
reciprocity in morals and in spiritual inspiration. The 
great task of the future is that of building this great 
Reciprocity trunk-road, that will circulate the life of 
the whole world in free unhampered commerce. This 
was William Blake^s dream a century ago: 

In my exchanges every land 
Shall walk, and mine in every land; 

Mutual shall build Jerusalem 
Both heart in heart and hand in hand, 

Father of Men, fill us with the passion of Fellowship, 
teach us beyond forgetting that we are members one of 
another, children of the same Father, brothers of one 
blood. And Thou who hast purposed to gather together 
all things in one in Christ, call us into the fellowship of 
Thy purpose, and fit us to share with Thee the travail 
that makes Thy Kingdom come. Amen. 


THE QUICKENING OF LIFE 

While we know a good deal about life, we do not 
yet know what it is. We have built up extensive and 
elaborate sciences, physiology and psychology, zoology 
and botany, anthropology and sociology—and of these, 
combinations and subdivisions without number. But 
as to what that thing is that all this knowledge is about 
we are no wiser than were our fathers. Here it is, 
all around us, taking, as Omar Khayyam says, ''all 
shapes from Mah to Mahi;'' but what is it? Wlien 
we are through with all our analysis and classification, 
when we have tabulated all the genera and the species 
from the amoeba, a microscopic dab of sensitive jelly, 
up at last to man, what is it all about? This dark and 
elusive thing we call Life, which yet is our very selves— 
when we try to define it, we are reduced to guess-work; 
and one guess is just as good or as bad as another. 
W'e are still in the dark. The searchlight of science 
has not tracked out this obstinate mystery. 

Nevertheless, with the curious presumption which 
is characteristic of human nature, some men have 
tried and some have fancied that they had succeeded 
in generating life in a laboratory. Now and again 
we hear of some one who claims to have discovered the 
secret of spontaneous generation, of quickening a focus 
of life in matter wholly dead; but nothing seems to 
come of it. No man has yet discovered a way of hatch¬ 
ing out a spark of life where there was no life before.- 


158 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

Life (so far as we can now tell) comes out of life, and 
out of life only. Life is self-perpetuating, self-generat- 
ing. It has its roots in itself. It survives by repro¬ 
ducing itself from generation to generation; life itself 
is the sole origin and source of life. It grows and 
thrives by assimilating to itself things that have no 
life; it lays hold of inanimate matter and uses it for 
its own development. But every new germ of life 
comes forth from the loins of life; by its own secret 
alchemy, it moves on in its ceaseless cycle of seed and 
fruitage, keeping its secret to itself and never running 
dry. 

This is true on every plane of life. The method 
varies endlessly, of course; but the fundamental fact 
remains unchanged. Life begets life, as truly in the 
spiritual as in the physical world. The seed may be 
sown in any one of a hundred ways—it miay be carried 
in a stave of music or on a spoken word; it may be 
blown out of the pages of a book or it may be dropped 
out of a noble deed; but, however it is done, there is a 
living agent involved in it somewhere. The truth that 
lies beneath the Roman doctrine of the Apostolical 
Succession is that the continuity of the faith is pre¬ 
served from age to age by personal agents, men and 
women transmitting it as a life and an experience from 
one generation to another across the years. In its 
modern form the doctrine has been coiTupted into a 
formal half-magical affair; but its essential meaning 
conveys a great truth. It is that the life of the spirit 
is quickened by the contact of human spirits; and that 
the Spirit of God uses us men and women as the in¬ 
struments of its propagation and increase. St. Paul 


THE QUICKENING OF LIFE 157 

was using a strong image, but he was well within the 
facts of the case, when he wrote to the Galatians that 
he was travailing in pain until Christ should be bom 
within them, and when later he called Timothy his 
son in the Gospel. 

Most of us who are alive at all, who are not mere^ 
wooden dummies without purpose or initiative, know 
perfectly well that such life as we have was quickened 
in us by our contact with some other person. I was 
reading the life of the Franciscan Jacopone da Todi 
the other day, and found that his quickening had 
come through the discovery after her death of the 
unpretentious goodness of his young wife. Some of 
us look back with gratitude to a day when the spark 
of a new life of faith and purpose was kindled in us 
by a teacher or a friend; and most of us cherish the 
fragrant memory of a parent whose word or deed was 
the seed of new life within us. It is life that begets 
life; and in the realm of the spirit no more than in the 
physical, is there such a thing as spontaneous genera¬ 
tion. Directly or indirectly, the Spirit of God uses 
human tools for the kindling of life. 

This raises a question of some consequence to all 
of us. All life is meant to be reproductive; and, in 
some way or other, all true life is. In the physical 
world, life sometimes reaches a dead end, a barrier 
which it seems unable to pass. The stream is lost in 
the sand. There are forms of life which have become 
extinct; others which have remained in a crude and 
rudimentary stage of development, being to-day much 
what their fossil ancestors seem to have been number¬ 
less eons ago. In the same way the vital impulse of 


158 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

families peters out—many an old family with a dis¬ 
tinguished record in history has wholly disappeared 
from the scene; and even large nations seem to have 
vanished, leaving no memorial save a few mounds and 
sandheaps. Just why life comes to these dead ends, 
these blind alleys, we do not altogether know; we are 
reduced once more to guesswork, though we do indeed 
know that the higher we go in the hierarchy of life 
the more do we find that life exacts its own penalties 
from those who abuse or pervert it. In the life of the 
spirit, sterility is altogether the penalty of indifference, 
neglect, and misuse. If you have a growing life in 
yourself, you will pass it on without knowing it; 
virtue will go out of you; and the people whom you 
touch in the ordinary ways of life will leave you with 
a quickened hope and a replenished energy. We all 
know people who have that effect upon us—there is a 
contagious health of mind about them and we feel 
cleaner, sounder, wholesomer, after a spell in their 
company. There are others whose courage and good 
cheer is infectious, with a charm in it to drive away 
bile and spleen. There are others again of a noble 
humility whose grace makes you fall in love with the 
lowliest service; and yet others whose eye has reached 
the hidden heart of the world and whose word reveals 
to you truth that makes you free. They are charged 
with life, storage batteries that need only a contact 
to pass on the precious energy, the quickening grace, 
the transfiguring light, that is in them. This is the 
office, the fimction, the destiny of the individual soul, 
to be the transmitter, the conductor of life—the live 
nerve-end of the Spirit of God. The supreme failure 


159 


THE QUICKENING OF LIFE 

to which you and I are exposed is that of being a 
spiritual dead-end, a blind alley that life can not 
break through. 

O Thou in whom is fulness of life evermore, grant 
that Thy life in us may never run dry. We confess that 
we are slow to search out the fountain of living waters; 
and our spirits grow arid and sterile within us. Stir 
us to repair betimes to the spring that we may he re¬ 
plenished, and that rivers of living water may flow out 
of us to quench thirst and to quicken life in needy folk 
about us. Amen, 




THE SPRINGS OF LIFE 
I 

The springs of the inner life are two—the life of our 
fellows round about us, and the primal infinite spring of 
life in God. The organ by which it absorbs nourish¬ 
ment from the life round about it is love; that by which 
it replenishes itself from the life that is hidden in God is 
faith. Each of these has its own characteristic ex¬ 
pression and exercise. Faith expresses and exercises 
itself in prayer; Love expresses itself in fellowship. 
So that the strength of our life depends upon the prac¬ 
tise of prayer and fellowship. 

First, then, about this matter of prayer. I have 
called it an exercise of faith. It is not the only way in 
which faith expresses itself. Faith is primarily the 
will to face life on the assumption that God is love; 
and faith may express itself in word and deed toward 
our fellow men no less than toward God. But there 
is an inward exercise of pure faith which is an endeavor 
to make connection with the ultimate basis of life, 
which tries to go right back through the complex 
of outward derivative things to their original source— 
to that something which some men call the Absolute, 
to that somebody whom others call God. And this 
exercise whatever be its form is prayer. 

Prayer is a lost art; even worse, it is a lost taste. 
Not only do we not know how to pray, we do not 
even want to pray. I am not now going to ask how 




162 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

this has come to pass—doubtless it can be explained; 
but what appears to be perfectly plain is that if we 
want to recover the art of prayer and the inclination 
to pray we shall have to go to school and begin at the 
beginning again. I do not propose to argue the 
question whether we should pray, whether it is any 
use praying; I shall not discuss the scientific or ra¬ 
tionalist objections to prayer. For me, it is enough 
to remember this, that the One Soul that ever walked 
this earth whose touch infallibly quickened life in 
every man who did not refuse to receive it was a man 
of prayer; and prayer occupied a larger place in his 
life than it did in his teaching. Again and again we 
read how he went alone to a desert place to pray; once 
we are told he spent the whole night in prayer. He 
does not say a great deal about it; he never argues 
about it, save only to show by an analogy how inevit¬ 
able it is that God should attend to His children's 
prayers. He just takes it for granted, as he takes 
breathing and eating and the day’s work—something 
that a healthy man would naturally do. If I am asked 
whether I believe in prayer, I reply, Jesus prayed. 
And if it be answered that the scientific objections are 
insuperable, I can only say, so much the worse for 
science. But nowadays we know that science is not 
omniscience—the writ of science runs only just so far 
as the eye can see. 

^ Anyway, you don’t need a philosophy before you 
begin to pray. I heard a friend—speaking of these 
things—say not long ago that a man lost in a wood 
does not wait to be sure that there is some one there 
to hear before he cries out. He cries out in order to 



THE SPRINGS OF LIFE 


163 


find if there he some one there. Prayer is indeed born 
of need, not of knowledge. And it’s no very difficult 
matter, either, to set about it. You need neither word 
nor gesture, only a mind turned God-ward, a mind 
sending out some hailing thought into the infinite; 
nay, not even a thought, just an unshaped longing, 
an unformed desire, as of 

An infant crying in the night, 

An infant crying for the light, 

And with no language but a cry! 

We are so made that some of us need the word to help 
us through, a symbol on which to lean the mind. 
Have your word, then, my friend, so it be a little 
simple uneloquent word. For you need not elaborate 
your case before God; the eloquent prayer is wasted 
breath. For God it is enough that you pray; hold out 
an expectant hand, show Him an empty heart—^that 
is enough. He knows your need better than you can 
tell Him; and for answer. He gives you what your 
speech could not compass. For He gives you Him¬ 
self, replenishes you with His own hidden boundless 
life. 

That is the one root; what of the other? It is a 
commonplace how much we need each other, how 
much we owe to each other, how little we can do 
without one another. We are—whether the thought 
be pleasing to us or not—integers in a vast fellowship, 
as wide as the world and as enduring as time. And 
so closely, so finely, so organically is this living mesh 
woven that you can not break a thread in it without 
hurting the whole fabric; and he who contributes 



164 


THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 


nothing to this fellowship is a ‘'dead end” a withered 
linib. Yet I am not so much concerned with what we 
shall contribute to the fellowship as with what the 
fellowship has to bring to us. It brings us sanity, 
wholesomeness and balance of mind; it brings us 
knowledge and experience; it brings us reinforcement 
and inspiration; it brings us—well, all things that men 
need to live by. It brings us even our food and cloth¬ 
ing, our light and heat. Despite all the schisms and 
conflicts, the animosities and hatreds, that rend it, 
at the very worst, life is a great and splendid partner¬ 
ship. 

But this partnership has more to bring us than 
we have yet dreamed, if only we would cultivate it 
more. “Sight, riches, healing of the mind,^^ says the 
hymn,—yes, all of this, and still more. For the most 
part our fellowships in life are things of chance, good 
enough for what they are. Who indeed would forego 
the fun and good fellowship of the easy cameraderie of 
an idle hour? It does us good; it warms our hearts; 
it oils the heavy-going axle-wheels of life. Yet here 
we but wade in the shallows; for there are depths 
unplumbed of health and grace in our human com¬ 
radeships, but they are not for the casual mind, or 
the idle hour. They are only for the explorer, the 
digger. If we want a fellowship that quickens, re¬ 
creates, redeems, we must make a business of it, giving 
to it our best, and expecting of it, nay, exacting from 
it, good measure, pressed down and running over. 
We must make a business of it, tightening old rivets, 
driving in new rivets, binding new bonds and bands, 
extending, deepening the ground of fellowship; and 


THE SPRINGS OF LIFE 165 

every new contact of friendship brings you a full 
cargo of the rare wine of life. Fellowship, friend¬ 
ship what is it but a hidden commerce, a mystic 
marketplace where we barter life for life in a com¬ 
munion of love, a transfusion of spirit by which life 
is fertilized and multiplied? The roots of your life 
are in your friends; God give us more roots, more 
friends! Prayer and Fellowship—then. But best of 
all, both together—prayer in fellowship, fellowship 
in prayer. 

Father, we thank Thee that Thou dost not hide Thyself 
from us; we do not need to seek Thee; for Thou art near 
to them who are of a lowly and contrite heart. Yet we 
forget Thee and live as though Thou wert not; and the 
spirit of life within us is enfeebled and exhausted. For¬ 
give us also the pride and self-esteem by which we are 
separated from and lose our brethren, so that our lives are 
impoverished and made fruitless. Help us to confirm 
the bonds by which we are united to Thee and to our fel¬ 
lows, that life may be rich and full in us evermore. Amen. 

II 

Prayer and Fellowship—here are the springs of life. 
But we have neither at its best without the other. 

The deepest, most enriching fellowship this 
world knows is that of folk who are seeking God 
together. This was what the Church was meant to 
be, and is not. It was started as a fellowship, and we 
have turned it into an institution. It originated as 
a communion, it has become a corporation. It began 
as a comradeship; to-day it is a number of organiza- 


166 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

tions more or less loosely attached to a pulpit. Heaven 
help it! And God alone knows just what we are miss¬ 
ing. 

Yet we can guess a little. We know what our 
fellowship means to us on the surface, what joy we 
have in oiu* friends, what sparkle is added to life by 
the exchanges of kindred spirits. And if our loose and 
casual comradeships on the surface of things can give 
us so much, how much closer, fuller, richer, how much 
more revealing and fulfilling, must our fellowship be 
in those deep tranquil regions of life which lie within 
hail of the Innermost, the Holiest of All! You know 
how a lovely scene looks twice lovelier when you 
stand before it with a friend; what then must the 
vision be when you look together at the face of God! 
And what the splendor of that fellowship! The larger 
the concerns of our fellowship, the more substantial 
and massive the fellowship itself becomes, the more 
intimately do we grow into each other, the more or¬ 
ganically are we fused one into the other. There is 
no such melting pot as the experience and the memory 
of great things seen together, great things done together, 
great things suffered together. And no greater 
thing is seen or done or suffered than by them who 
share the toil and the travail, the romance and the 
grandeur, of the great adventure of finding God. 

Nor indeed does our prayer reach the height of 
its possibility save in fellowship. There is room in 
life for the prayer of solitude—for the desert place 
apart; but most of us have forgotten all about it. 
At the best, we offer a perfunctory hurried bedside 
prayer, morning and evening. I say nothing in 


THE SPRINGS OF LIFE 


167 


contempt even of that. If you still keep up the old 
habit, stick to it—hard. It is a link with life; and 
you know not what quickening word may be flashed 
along it to you from the Throne, any day. But of 
the prayer of fellowship, what shall we say? Well, 
go to the average prayer meeting—and that will be 
enough. That is a dead end, beyond any doubt! I 
confess that the average prayer meeting depresses 
me more than any other experience that I have in the 
normal course of things. Here we need to go back to 
the very beginning, in very soberness and truth— 
very simply and unaffectedly to learn over again how 
to pray together. And I am not siu^ that this does 
not mean coming to a Quaker meeting—not to pray 
but to listen, not to speak but to wait. God is not 
dumb that we need to be forever speaking; nor is He 
deaf, that we should assail Him with our voices; nor is 
He supine, needing to be melted by our eloquence. 
But we shall—beyond any peradventure—have to 
reacquire the practise of fellowship in prayer before 
there will be any efflorescence of new life in the Church 
or in the world, a concerted siege of the unseen, a 
joint stock enterprise in the deep things of God. The 
great reservoirs of life are full to the brim; but the 
pipes are clogged—clogged by our self-sufficiency and 
pride and unbelief. There is water in the well, but 
we have not wherewith to draw. There is grain in 
the granary, but we have lost the key. 

Life, abundant, rich, victorious, is available here 
and now for them who by prayer and fellowship bring 
themselves within reach of it. 

Come ye to the waters; come ye^ buy and drink; 



168 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

buy wine and milk without money and without price. 
The same old market place still, and its treasures 
sold without measure or reserve to those who bring 
the coin of faith and love. 

Lord our God, teach us to pray; teach us what things 
we should pray for; teach us to pray together; hut above 
all teach us that, beyond all we ask or desire, our prayers 
are our acceptance of Thy Good and Perfect Will. Thou 
art our Father; only in Thee are we fulfilled; and grant 
to us that, being enriched in our fellowship one with 
another, our common fellowship with Thee may fill 
us unto all the fullness of God. Amen. 


SOUL SIGHT 


No man sees who sees only with his eyes. William 
Blake used to say that he saw not with his eyes but 
through them, by which he meant that he saw with his 
mind. Eyesight is a good and precious gift; yet with 
the eye we see only things, and the better and greater 
sight is that which perceives the hidden meaning and 
the mystic relation of things. So we speak well of in¬ 
sight and foresight —the secondary vision that pierces 
the shell and finds the kernel. 

Yet beyond this power of sight there is another 
which goes deeper; and this we simply call vision. 
It is that power of perception which seeks and finds 
the mind of God—sees ^‘sermons in stones, books in 
the running brooks, and God in ev^erything which 
searches out and discovers the will of God in the 
process of life. 

Now vision, whether of the body or of the soul, 
depends on two things, an organ and a medium. In 
physical sight, the organ is the eye and the medium 
is light. Whether we shall ever be able to give names 
to the faculties of perception which dwell in the soul, 
who can say? It is, to some extent at least, mislead¬ 
ing to speak of the soul seeing, hearing, feeling. But 
here we can not help ourselves. We are creatures of 
sense; and we can think of the realities of the spirit 
only in the similitudes of sense. But some organ of 
perception there is in the spirit, some faculty of vision. 


170 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

of apprehension. And of this the one sure thing that 
we know is that it is perfected by use and destroyed 
by non-use. 

It is tragically true of most of us that our spiritual 
vision suffers from inadequate use. We have it still, 
for we have not yet quenched it by deliberate neglect; 
but we have given it little practise. We have not 
taken pains to develop its sensitiveness, its keenness, 
its grasp, to put ourselves in the way of visions, in¬ 
tuitions, inspirations. Once, you remember, it came 
to you, in the quiet of the night time—a fleeting visi¬ 
tant that seemed to breathe on you and into you some 
deep peace, some quickening word. You had a new 
perception of your own soul in a transfiguring light; 
and away in the dim distance a flickering glimpse of 
that splendor of perfect life which Jesus called the 
Kingdom of Heaven. It went away—but only to be 
invited to return. It has not returned because you 
did not will it to return; you stretched out no expect¬ 
ant hand, sent out no inviting thought, uttered no 
prayer for the return of that vivifying and revealing 
light. Yet I believe it to be possible to reach such 
proficiency in evoking this vision that we can set our¬ 
selves in readiness for its coming with the same assur¬ 
ance that it will come as that with which we expect 
a dark room to be flooded with light when we push 
the switch-button on the wall. 

Truly there is little lacking to our spiritual vision 
except use. If we put ourselves in the way of visions 
and revelations they will not be denied to us; they will 
come at our bidding. Yet their vividness and their 
definition and their certainty depend on certain con- 



SOUL SIGHT 


171 


ditions. During the war—and especially after the 
Battle of Jutland—we were familiarized with the 
phrase ^'low visibility/^ And the souhs perceptions 
suffer from the low visibility of the medium, which is 
only to be remedied by two things. Or, I should say, 
high visibility depends upon two conditions: 

First: ''Blessed are the pure in heart, for they 
shall see God.'' Purity of heart is simply what we 
mean when we speak of single-mindedness. Do we 
not say of certain persons of pure and untainted qual¬ 
ity that they are "transparent," which means that 
we can see through them, that light can penetrate 
them, that no veil of insincerity or pose or affectation 
stops the passage of the light? There are few of us 
who possess this quality; and this is not perhaps al* 
together our own fault. We are driven by social 
conventions and artificial standards of behavior into 
situations in which we are beset by numberless little 
insincerities, and are habitually betrayed into affecta¬ 
tions and compromises which spread a thin mist over 
the eye of the soul. Nothing can help us here save a 
resolute endeavor to recapture a genuine simplicity 
of life. Most of us are pursuing too many incongru¬ 
ous ends to be quite honest with ourselves, or with one 
another, or with God. 

Second: St. Paul uses an expression which is 
commonly translated, "speaking the truth in love;" 
but the verb he uses must, if we are to translate it 
literally, be rendered "truthing it in love," which 
means not only speaking the truth, but also seeing it, 
and living it. But we can neither live nor act nor 
speak the truth except as we see it; and we can not see 


172 THE PAPERS OF JOHN- PERERIN 

truth except in the clear air and the long distances of 
love. Self-regard causes not low visibility so much as 
(and especially at last) total eclipse. G. K. Chester¬ 
ton says that Hanwell (a large lunatic asylum near 
London) is full “of people who believe in themselves;'' 
which is simply an epigrammatic way of saying that 
men's natural light is abated and dimmed by too much 
concern about themselves. We can only keep sane 
as we love one another; and for all the pride and self- 
love we harbor, we are by so much insane, unsound in 
mind. Pride inflicts not only moral but intellectual 
damage. You can only have a great mind if you 
have a great love. Within the special region of the 
spirit, this is the more true. Isolation means total 
invisibility. “Pae solis,” “woe to those who are for 
themselves alone," said the ancients; and they knew 
what they were talking about. When I was a stu¬ 
dent, it used to be necessary for certain operations in 
the study of optics to focus a telescope for parallel 
rays. The physical laboratory overlooked the sea; 
and we used to focus the telescope upon a bell-buoy 
seven miles out. Then we had the telescope in order 
for precise and exact observation within the laboratory 
itself. This is a parable of all true sight. You can 
only see the thing near by properly when your eye is 
trained to distant visions, Buddha ordained for 
the brothers of his order that they should “let their 
minds pervade the whole wide world with heart of love;" 
and he was right. Without love there is no vision; 
without an expanding charity there is no clear sight! 

Ldght that never failest, pity our darkness and send 
forth the Sun of Righteousness to shine in our spirits. 


SOUL SIGHT 


173 


Forgive us the pride, the self-will, the indolence, that 
blind us; and purge us of whatsoever may dim and blur 
our vision of Thee and of Thy Deep Things. May we 
live in the calm radiance of Thy Presence where we may 
see familiarly those things which eye hath not seen and 
which have not entered into the heart of man. Amen, 



s. 





^^McCONNACHIE” 


I wonder whether you have heard of McCon- 
nachie. If the report be true, he is a very important 
person, and we owe him a good deal. Perhaps you 
read about him in Sir James Barrie's (or J. M. Bar¬ 
rie's as we best know him) rectorial speech at St. 
Andrews. In case you missed that very delightful 
and exhilarating overflow of the Barrie genius, let me 
tell you what he says about McConnachie: 

“McConnachie, I should explain, is the name I 
give to the unruly half of myself—the writing half. 
We are complement and supplement. I am the half 
that is dour and practical and canny, he is the fanciful 
half; my desire is to be the family solicitor, standing 
firm on my hearth-rug among the harsh realities of the 
office furniture, while he prefers to fly around on one 
wing. I shouldn't mind him doing that, but he drags 
me with him." And later in the address, he tells us 
that it is McConnachie who writes the plays. 

Now we all know our Barrie; and we have dis¬ 
covered that when his touch is lightest, his thought 
is deepest. For instance, he says somewhere—in 
*‘The Little White Bird," I think—^that ''the God 
that little boys say their prayers to has a face very 
much like their mother's." That, we say, is a pretty 
thought; but look at it again, and you will discover 
that he has turned into poetry more of the Gospel than 
the theologians ever got into the creeds. And "Me- 


176 


THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 


Connachie^^ is Mr. Barriers way of saying that man 
shall not live by bread alone, that there is something 
in ns that has a wing. For each one of us has his 
McConnachie—not perhaps a McConnachie that 
goes singing through our minds for many days, but a 
real McConnachie nevertheless. When one is through 
with the day's work and shuts out the clamor of the 
streets, in the quiet of one's own familiar chamber, 
one hears a faint flutter, flutter, as of a poor broken 
wing. Well, that is McConnachie, your McConnachie 
reminding you that he is there and trying to fly 
where he belongs. Sir James Barrie's McConnachie 
does what he likes with him; but most of us keep Mc¬ 
Connachie under severely. We won't stand any non¬ 
sense from him, for he is apt to be a nuisance in the 
office and in the market place. He rather distracts 
the mind from the price of eggs and the rise and fall 
of Standard Oil. And the poor fellow has been so sat 
upon through the day that all he can do is that tiny 
flutter you sometimes hear when the lights are out. 
Yet McConnachie is the most important part of you, 
after all; and he has a secret worth more than all the 
inside information that is so useful on the stock- 
exchange, or all that crusted worldly wisdom which 
you and I so deplorably mistake for the truth of 
life. And I will give you—if you will take it—a piece 
of advice that is worth more than rubies, more than 
all the gold of Ophir and Klondyke—for it is one 
ultimate piece of wisdom that will stand when all 
the subtleties and sophistications that pass for com¬ 
mon sense and intelligence have shriveled up into the 
contemptible little lies that they are—and it is this: 





“McCONNACHIE” 


177 


Do not sit on McConnachie, give him a man^s chance. 

For McConnachie is that part of you that God 
made on His own image. You do not see him when 
you look at your face in the glass. But he is there, 
unless indeed you have wholly strangled him. For 
that is unfortunately possible. If you can hear that 
flutter in the silence of the night-time, cherish it, en¬ 
courage it; for it is your one link with the world 
where you really belong. That tiny flutter, that 
faint beating of a broken wing, is a signal which youi’ 
true self is sending to that invisible City of God where 
your true home is. It was the McConnachie in Sir 
William Watson that once sang: 

“So between this starry dome 
And this floor of earth and^^seas, 

I have never felt at home, 

Never wholly been at ease." 

Beware of strangling McConnachie. If you will give 
him a chance, he will take you where you belong. 

A little time before Sir James Barrie had spoken 
at St. Andrews, Mr. John Masefield had also de¬ 
livered a very remarkable address at Aberdeen. 
*Xife,^^ he said, ^fls infinitely more mysterious than 
anything you can say. You can not probe its mystery. 
You know nothing about it. Then you will be filled 
with despair. Then you will turn again to your work. 
You will realize that somewhere outside life there 
come gleams and suggestions—a kind of butterflies 
floating into this world from somewhere. You make 
yourself the determination that you will follow these 
butterflies of the soul and find that you will come at 


178 


THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 


last to some country that is quite close to this life of 
ours. You will be able to enter it and make it visible 
to the rest of mankind and then you go on in that 
faith.^' Now here is Mr. Masefield too saying ''that 
man shall not live by bread alone/' but by a kind of 
butterflies that float into this world from somewhere. 
And this really tells you what McConnachie is doing 
when he is flying about with his one wing. He is 
chasing these butterflies of the soul. "Gleams and 
suggestions/' Mr. Masefield calls them—like butter¬ 
flies, in many colors. These butterflies are the final 
realities, between them they carry the ultimate secret 
of life. It is McConnachie, not I, that understands 
the serious business of existence. It is not you and I 
who are the practical people, we who would spend 
our days grubbing among roots when we might be¬ 
come familiar with the stars, who live in the tumult 
of the streets when we might hear the music of the 
spheres, who crawl painfully along the ground when 
we might mount up with wings. No, McConnachie 
is the hard-headed man of business after all, when he 
flies about on his one wing, chasing the eternal butter¬ 
flies of God. Perhaps you don't believe it. Then, 
my friend, so much the worse for you. 

Now let me make a little confession. I have 
moments of vanity when I plume myself on being 
very modern, quite up to the minute as the saying is. 
And you observe how very much on time I am just 
now: the latest utterances of Sir James Barrie and Mr. 
John Masefield. Here they are—as it were—hot from 
the oven. But all this is as old as the hills, or at least 
as old as man. I think it really dates from the 



“McCONNACHIE” 


179 


moment when a man—whoever he was—first dis¬ 
covered himself, and something inside of him began 
asking questions—Who are you? Where did you 
come from? It was McConnachie who was asking 
these questions. McConnachie is really the oldest 
man in the world; and the oldest occupation in the 
world is that of chasing butterflies. For ever since 
that day mankind has been pursuing an elusive secret. 
His life is a mystery, as Mr. Masefield says; but in his 
heart he knows it is a mystery with a meaning. And 
he finds a hint here and a hint there, and he chases it; 
and always it leads him to the edge of the world; and 
all that he knows is that the secret is over there in that 
uncharted beyond. You have the story of this 
chase right up to date in the 28 th chapter of the book 
of Job. Men have mined the earth, says this old 
writer, and they have found silver and gold, and iron 
and copper and precious stones; but they have not 
found the great secret. They have done great things 
on the earth, leveled mountains to make roads, con¬ 
structed canals and reservoirs; they have scaled the 
heights and explored the seas; but the sea saith. It is 
not in me. When men go down to the last dark gate¬ 
way of death, there is ''a rumbling of a distant drum,'' 
and that is all. ^'Destruction and Death say, 'We have 
heard a rumor thereof.' " So it is to this day. Science, 
exploration, philosophy, psychical research—they are 
all so many desperate inquiries for this key of life, 
long, long searches for the ultimate secret, expeditions 
that man has made to discover 

The hills where his life rose 
And the sea where it goes . . . 


180 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

And all because McConnachie will not leave us alone. 
We have to keep at it. Up he goes on his one wing and 
drags us with him. And if we protest and say: Look 
here, McConnachie, this is useless. WeVe tried 
philosophy and it hasn't been much help. We have 
explored the heavens above and the waters beneath; 
we have even tried the ouija-board, some of us. And 
we are no further along than Job was. Let us have a 
rest and go on making money and having a good time. 
But we can not get McConnachie to see it that way. 
There is a path, he says, which no bird of prey knoweth 
and the falcon's eye hath not seen; and I'll bring you 
to it, if you will only let me. But you won't. You 
sit on me, you clip my only wing, you keep me under; 
but only give me a chance and I'll show you some¬ 
thing. That is what that tiny flutter means that you 
hear in the cool of the day. It is McConnachie trying 
to persuade you to go with him along that path that 
the vulture's eye hath not seen. 

And thank God for McConnachie's pertinacity. 
If you and I pull through on the far shore at last, it 
will be because McConnachie would not let go of us. 
Do you remember how he kept his hold of Jacob? 
When Jacob was going out into the world to carve his 
fortune, he lay down on the first night of his journey 
near the little city of Luz, very lonely and tired, think¬ 
ing a good deal about the old folks at home. And 
McConnachie took the chance, and he showed Jacob 
that ladder that led to heaven and the angels ascend- 
ing and descending upon it. Jacob had seen a glimpse 
of that country that is far off," and next morning he 
was very sober and devout. Then he went on to La- 


“McCONNACHIE” 


181 


ban^s house, and you remember how he prospered. 
Every year the man grew richer; his silver and his 
gold and his cattle multiplied . . . and the man's 
soul was dying within him. And Jacob said, “Let it 
die;" it was only a hindrance, anyhow; it was stand¬ 
ing in his way. Without that troublesome soul, he 
would get richer a good deal quicker. But he had 
reckoned without McConnachie. One day there was 
a pitched battle between them, a terrible struggle. 
Jacob had meant to strangle his soul once for all. And 
he and McConnachie wrestled until the breaking of 
the day. It was a bare victory for McConnachie in 
the end; and Jacob went with a lame soul the rest of 
this life. But with his soul alive. And the upper 
hand with McConnachie; and McConnachie never let 
him go until he had got him back to Bethel—to start 
out all over again and to make his second venture 
something less of a failure than the first had been. 
McConnachie does that kind of thing with us all. 
There is that man—now well on in middle life. He 
has done very well for himself, as we say; perhaps he 
has a reputation down town of driving a hard bargain; 
and some of the lines upon his face are a trifle harder 
than they need be. But he is sitting at home now, 
alone; the curtains are drawn and the city is asleep; 
he goes into his pocket and draws out of its case a 
faded old photograph. His face grows tender; a mist 
floats over his eyes; and his mind wanders back to his 
old mother in the country . . . and he sees all the 
years between. . . . God help him! You see, it is 
McConnachie trying to get him, like Jacob, back to 
Bethel, to the forsaken little altar of long ago; and one 


182 


THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 


of these days he will get him there too. And you have 
your altar back there in your life—the day when you 
gave yourself to God, do you remember it? The 
mountains were tipped with gold; and there was a high 
light in your eye and a new spring in your step. You've 
traveled a long way since then; and the altar has 
receded more and more into the dim distance. But you 
are never safe from McConnachie; perhaps (and please 
God) I may be stirring him up in you. . . and I hope 
he will give you no peace until he has driven you back 
to recover the freshness of that bright morning when 
you felt the breath of God upon your cheek. . . and 
like Jacob you make a new start. 

And there are other ways in which McConnachie 
gets at us. Not only does he rake up old memories, 
as he did with Jacob, but he kindles new ideas, he 
sends us a stave of music, or he takes us to see a 
golden sunset; Fve no doubt too that he occasionally 
sends you to church. You never can tell just what 
he may do. But do not, as the Lord liveth, try to 
elbow him off. Nay, rather, you would be wise to 
encourage him. When you feel that flutter in the 
twilight, when that swift pang of longing for a face 
beloved but lost comes over you, when you hear a 
still small voice that makes you rather uncomfortable 
about something you did during the day, say, oh say, 
''Go to it, McConnachie, go to it!'' And he will take 
you at your word. And only God in His heaven can 
tell you where McConnachie will take you. There 
was a young man who let McConnachie fly away with 
him, and "I saw" (this is what he said) "I saw the 
Lord sitting on a throne, high and lifted up." And 



“McCONNACHIE” 


183 


perhaps you might see that. And another man was 
taken by McConnachie to the top of a high mountain, 
and (he said) saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, 
coming down from God out of heaven;'' and you 
might see that. Or he may show you what he showed 
Francis Thompson, that waif who found in London 
streets the path which the falcon's eye hath not seen, 
and this is his account of it: 

“When so sad thou canst not sadder 
Cry, and on thy so sore loss 
Shall shine the traffic of Jacob’s ladder 
Pitched between heaven and Charing Cross, 

“Yes, in the night, my son, my daughter. 

Cry, clinging heaven by the hems. 

And, lo! Christ walking on the water. 

Not of Gennesaret but the Thames." 

Yes, what you do with McConnachie is a matter 
of life or death; for McConnachie is that part of you 
that is in league with the Spirit of God to save your 
soul and make a man of you. 







THE KINGDOM OF LIFE 


As I understand it, the Kingdom of God is the 
divine order of life. It is therefore the bedrock of 
reality for us; and a present fact which may be per¬ 
ceived and apprehended. We are apt overmuch to 
speak of it as a hope of the future, as a goal to be striven 
for, an ideal to be realized. But while the Kingdom is 
not a finished work, it is an existing fact. That we 
do not see it does not alter that. You remember 
Kipling's jingle, 

If England were what England seems, 

And not the England of our dreams, 

How quick we’d chuck her! But she ain’t! 

For the poet the real England is not the England of 
appearance, but the subcutaneous hidden England— 
the noble and splendid Albion of Blake's visions, the 
idealized England of Browning—out of sight and 
often giving itself the lie by the blindness of politicians 
and the perversity of narrow and greedy men, yet 
there all the time. So it is everywhere. Beneath the 
surface is the Kingdom of God, wide as the world, 
enduring as eternity. Its face is often whipped up 
into storm and fury by the winds of human passion; 
and it becomes a bewildering chaos as it is to-day. 
But beneath the surface are the unutterable depths of 
life, infinitely calm and moving toward some un¬ 
imaginable splendor of creation and joy by the inde- 


186 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

feasible will of the God out of whose love it first came 
and still comes forth. All this fuss of politics, of 
business, of conflict, is but the foam of the little waves 
that fret the placidity of the great ocean; and beneath 
the surface are the great inexhaustible, moving tides 
of life. Beyond the half-lights and half-truths of 
controversy, beneath the action, reaction, interaction, 
of passion and perverseness which sow and spread 
sorrow and pain among men, the Kingdom of Life 
standeth sure; the City of God remaineth. 

To see the Kingdom of God is to find reality, that 
center upon which, amid all this restlessness, our 
spirits may rest. But it is even more. It is to become 
part of it, to enter into it, as Jesus said; to belong to it, 
to become naturalized in the unseen, to gain the 
franchise of God’s universe. And that as a present 
possession. '‘Ye are not come,” says the writer of 
Hebrews, “to the mount that might be touched and 
that burned with fire . . . but ye are come imto 
Mount Zion, to the City of the living God ... to the 
general assembly of the first-born who are written in 
heaven”—to everything that matters and abides. 
Ye are come, notice. This is no deferred benefit; it 
is there we belong here and now. And having your 
anchor within the veil, neither storm nor tempest nor 
wind nor flood can avail to undo you; and the chances 
of time and the vicissitudes of history can not break 
your certainty and your peace. Where others but 
exist, you have life. 

Yet you have it here—in this world of time and 
things. And (let me repeat) not as a potentiality but 
as a possession. This is no thing that you want to 


187 


THE KINGDOM OF LIFE 

hurry off with, that you may possess it in peace else¬ 
where. It is something that makes you fall in love 
with life here and now. It does not send you singing: 

I’m but a stranger here, 

Heaven is my home, 

Earth’s but a desert drear. 

Do you remember where Bunyan says that the river 
of death runs through the King’s country? It does 
not separate the King’s country from this world of 
time—it is the King’s country on both sides of it. 
And that is what this life does for you—it transfigures 
your world and it makes the wilderness blossom like 
a rose at your feet. The joy of life? This is the joy 
of life, this life of eternity in a world of time. To it 
nothing is wanting; and he who has it is the true 
freeman, master of all things and mastered by 
none. 

And this Kingdom within becomes a principle 
of valuation and selection. It shows you the things 
that are worth spending your energy on, the things that 
minister to the increase and fulness of life. It shows 
you just what money is and what it is worth; it shows 
what true power is, where to get it and how to use it. 
It is like a Roentgen ray that shows the hollowness, 
the emptiness, the wastefulness of aims and usages, 
conventions and acceptances into which so many of us 
pour the precious stuff of life and waste it. When 
this vision of life came to St. Paul, it turned his whole 
program of life upside down. The aims he had pur¬ 
sued seemed turned to dung. His pedigree, his social 
standing, his ecclesiastical position, even his religious 


188 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

distinction, all vanished in a day. '‘What things were 
gain to me, those I counted loss for Christ;” and for 
him henceforth there was but one thing—“This one 
thing I do, I press toward the mark for the prize of the 
high calling of God in Christ Jesus.” And he found 
everything there—even life itself. “To me to live is 
Christ!” 

Yea, through life, death, through sorrow and through sinning, 
Christ shall suffice me for he hath sufficed; 

Christ is the end, for Christ was the beginning, 

Christ the beginning, for the end is Christ. 

And that substantially is what comes to all of us, 
though it be different in its outworking. Not all of 
us—indeed, very few of us—have the gift and the 
vocation for an itinerant apostolate; yet to each of us 
is given both a gift and a vocation of our own. And 
this vision of life becomes a vision of oneself. The 
revelation of the Kingdom focuses itself into a trans¬ 
figuring self-discovery. In that light, you find your¬ 
self; at last you know who you are, what you are, 
what you are meant to do and how you are to do it; 
and you will cry out in grateful surprise—“This I 
know, that whereas I was once blind, I now see,” 

Lord of Ldfe, who hast ordained for us splendor and 
fulness of Life, forgive us that we are content to live at 
this poor dying rate; we grub among the roots when we 
might become familiar with the stars; we are deafened by 
the noise and tumult of the street when we might hear 
the music of the spheres. Out of this meanness and 
narrowness of life, lift us into the abounding Life of Thy 
Kingdom. Amen. 



A WORLD WITHOUT A SEA 

Some years ago, sailing through the Aegean Sea^ 
I could descry a number of small islands in the offing, 
Of these one was pointed out to me as the island of 
Patmos. It seemed to be a desolate little rock amid 
great waters, and I understood in a moment why 
the ^ffiew earth^^ of the Apocalypse was a world with¬ 
out a sea. In that world, there would be no old 
men marooned on lonely islands, looking hungrily 
across a wild waste of waters for a fellowship which 
was denied to them. 

This is no longer the way we think of the sea. 
We have conquered it and converted it into a highway. 
To-day, it does not separate; it joins. George Mere-, 
dith has given us the modern Christian doctrine of 
the use of the sea: 

It is to knit with loving life 
The interests of land to land, 

To join in far seen fellowship 
The tropic and the polar strand. 

Nevertheless the Seer of Patmos was essentially right. 
From the new earth every hindrance to fellowship 
will have vanished. 

Certain of our poets have spoken of a tragic, 
loneliness that seems to surround the human spirit.. 
Thus Longfellow: We are 


190 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

Ships that pass in the night and speak to each other in passing— 
Only a signal shown . . . then silence again and darkness; 

and Matthew Arnold: 

Y ea, on the sea of life enisled 
With echoing straits between us thrown 
Dotting the shoreless watery wild, 

We mortal millions live alone. 

But it is not true that there is a loneliness which is 
fated and can not be overcome. To be sure, there are 
souls hedged about with so invincible a reticence, sur¬ 
rounded with ramparts of love so impassable, that we 
leave them in their solitude, supposing them to be 
sufficient unto themselves. Some such people I have 
known; and my experience has been that, save for a 
few morbid and misanthropic spirits, these lonely folk 
are starving and crying out for fellowship. 

Yet though there be no loneliness to which we are 
doomed, there is a loneliness to be sought out for our¬ 
selves. We moderns live too much in public (which is 
not the same thing as living in fellowship). We are no 
longer familiar with the solitudes and the quiet places 
—^being, alas! only altogether happy in the hum of 
the crowd and the clatter of the streets. We have be¬ 
come fearful of ourselves, too fearful to face ourselves 
alone. Yet God has some things to say to you 
yourself, things to whisper in your ear. God's 
deepest things are spoken in a voice so still and so small 
that you can only hear it when the din of men has died 
down, and you find yourself alone, perhaps in the dear 
quiet of your own familiar chamber or on some moor- 
dand where you share with the wild fowl the stillness of 


A WORLD WITHOUT A SEA 


191 


the outer court of heaven. There are times when, as 
between God and you, two's company and three's 
none. 

Other than this sought-out loneliness, there is no 
loneliness which is not a disease or a sin, the disease of 
the misanthrope and the shy, the sin of the proud and 
the selfish. This manner of loneliness is something not 
to be endured or tolerated; it is something to be ob¬ 
literated and overcome. On the sea of life, it is our 
business not to be travelers but mariners, sailor-men 
who make of the ocean a bridge of souls. The sailor 
is he who turns the sea into a common carrier of men 
and of the things by which men live. He is the symbol 
of the essential Christian character, of that ministry 
of fellowship which is the genius and soul of true 
Christian living. God knows, there is need of bold 
and adventurous sea-farers among us who will venture 
out on this wild sea of conflict and controversy, of 
class-antagonisms and hatreds, to subdue it, to reopen 
sea-routes that have been abandoned, to relay cables 
that have been cut, to bring somewhat of unity and 
fellowship to life once more. And perchance a crew 
of such venturers may find that they have taken with 
them in the ship the Lord of Life, who will as of old 
rebuke the winds and the waves, and say “Peace, he 

stilir 

“Fellowship is life; lack of fellowship is death; 
fellowship is heaven; lack of fellowship is hell." So 
John Ball said in his sermon, and it is a true sa3dng. 
We are members one of another; and we never reach 
the joy of life except as we play the part, as we go 
forth beyond all frontiers of kinship or friendship or 


192 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

class-interest, to create a human unity as wide as the 
world, to knit the strands of the world^s life into a fair 
and many-colored fabric. 

Father of Men, who hast so made us that we only 
find ourselves in each other, that we make the best neither 
of ourselves nor of our brethren except in a living and 
unreserving fellowship, grant us the spirit of Jesus, 
friend of publicans and sinners, lover of castaways and 
derelicts, forgiver of his enemies, that we may bring his 
purpose to a sure end, bestowing peace on them that are 
nigh and upon them that are afar off, so making of the 
twain one new man. For their sakes, let us, like him, 
dedicate ourselves to the great enterprise of building a 
world of Life without a sundering sea. Amen. 


MADONNA 


The figure of Mary in the Gospels is hardly im¬ 
pressive enough to explain her place in Christian tradi¬ 
tion. Probably the invincible human craving for a 
human point of contact with God has something to do 
with it. The philosophers had hidden God behind an 
opaque cloud of abstraction; and the theologians had 
interred Jesus beyond resurrection in the grave of a 
formula. And this poor human heart of ours said to 
itself, *Tf I can not reach the Father or the Son, let me 
at least try to find the Mother.” 

Yet back of this is another feeling. In the old 
Pagan pantheon were goddesses as well as gods. 
This was no groundless fancy; it grew out of the simple 
fact that ‘'male and female made He them.” Man¬ 
kind is bi-sexual; and men argued that it must be in 
the home of the gods as it is here on earth. There was, 
they believed, a female principle in the ideal world as 
in this world of sense. It is an abiding bias in human 
nature to seek the woman in God; and the instinct is 
essentially sound. Human nature demands an ideal¬ 
ized woman no less than an idealized man. Christen¬ 
dom has found its idealized man in Jesus and its 
idealized woman in Mary. And both these elements 
enter, whether we be Protestant or Catholic, into our 
conception of the Ultimate Reality that we call God. 
We know that men and women are fulfilled in each 
other, that their union and fusion are needed to the 


194 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

full attainment of personality; and so we infer that 
in the perfect Personality to which we give the name 
of God, the ideal glory of manhood and the ideal 
beauty of womanhood are joined in a final perfection. 

This circumstance establishes a standard for the 
bearing of men and women to each other. Just as we 
say that we should look for the face of the Son of Man 
in every man’s face, so we should look for the face of 
the Madonna in every woman’s face. It is only as we 
men treat women with that honor and reverence that 
we ourselves can become the men we ought to be. 
The man who holds woman cheap, generally holds 
himself dirt-cheap. But the woman’s responsibility 
is no less. This Madonna tradition shows how man¬ 
kind has idealized its women; and that good habit is 
not lost. Every man has some time or another 
idealized a woman; and many a man goes on idealizing 
a woman all his life. The woman by his side has the 
face of the Madonna in his eyes; and if she ceases to 
look like a Madonna, it is not always his fault. 

But it is worth some thought too that the Ma¬ 
donna is idealized in her character as mother. For 
the Madonna is always painted with her child in her 
arms. It is an attempt to express the mystic, sacra¬ 
mental quality in motherhood which every clean and 
healthy mind recognizes. It is an instructive circum¬ 
stance that, while the religious sentiment of mankind 
has given to man a Father, it has given to God a 
Mother. For it called Mary the Mother of God. 
There you have this very great thing—that our human 
instinct when it is true to itself finds the highest of all 
religious values in this mystery of motherhood. This 


MADONNA 


195 

has grown, I believe, out of the fact that the human 
mother has become the symbol as she is the supreme 
organ of the continuity of life. While man has 
through the ages given thought and strength to the 
destruction of life, the woman has gone on replenishing 
the life that men have so wantonly destroyed. Per¬ 
haps now that women are entering on a larger share of 
the direction of public life and are to exert a larger influ¬ 
ence upon the course and destiny of our common life, 
we may, please God, look to a new birth of the politics 
of the conservation and redemption of life, in place of 
the politics of male stupidity that have so often laid 
waste the fair earth of our inheritance, drenching its 
soil and staining its seas with the blood of its youth. 

We men and women have yet to learn to give a 
religious value to our mutual relation; normally we 
rise no higher than a valuation of sentiment or passion. 
But we were meant to achieve personal completeness 
in each other, to become not alone one flesh, but one 
soul; and this we do only as in all our relations we share 
with each other freely the gifts, whether of nature or of 
grace, that have come to us by the grace of God. We 
are equals who are necessary to each other; and we are 
appointed to a partnership of equals in the whole 
economy of life. And whatever advantage the man 
may have in the distribution of natural gifts, it is not 
to him that the final grace and glory of our humanity 
is given, but to the woman, in that lovely office and 
sacrament that we call Motherhood which is at once 
the symbol and the Sanctuary of Life. 

Thou who didst make us in Thine own image, yet 
modest us men and women that we might in each other 


196 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

find the fulness of life, deliver us from all base and mean 
thoughts of the mystery of manhood and womanhood. 
''This strange and lovely fire that fuses man and maid 
into one flesh, one soul” is Thy gift to us; help us to 
cherish it and ever to bring it to be renewed and fed at 
the hand of the Giver. And living our mated life in Thee, 
may we ever be sensitive to the touch of the Hand that 
bound us together and, as the days go by, be bound to¬ 
gether more closely and dearly in holy communion of 
body and soul. Amen. 


^THESE THINGS THE SOLDIERS DID^^ 


Not, of course, because they were soldiers, but 
because they were the kind of men they were. They 
divided the victim's clothes among them and cast lots 
for his seamless robe. But that is not the significant 
point about them. They were just simply doing as 
they always did; it was their share of the spoils, 
and they were disposing of it in the usual way. But 
it tells us a great deal about them that they were 
able to do what they did just there and just at that 
moment. They stand out as the classic type of in¬ 
sensibility. There in the presence of the greatest 
tragedy of the world's history they could shut it 
all out and throw dice for garments. 

The Cross of Christ remains the great issue of life, 
it was not something that happened once for all and 
was then done with. The Cross is always here. It 
is a present fact. There always has been a Cross in 
the heart of God and it is still there, being enacted 
eternally while there is sin in the world. The sins of 
men are still flaying the Lamb of God, still nailing 
him to the tree. And in the presence of this eternal 
sacrifice, this self-giving love, the mass of men go about 
their business as though nothing were happening. 
That dark thing that happened on Calvary is happen¬ 
ing still, and the son of Man is never off the Cross. 
The desperate tides of the whole great world's an¬ 
guish are still being forced through the channels of his 


198 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

heart. And from the height of that Cross there comes 
to us to-day the agonizing cry: Is it nothing to you, all 
ye that pass by? And multitudes upon multitudes of 
decent ordinary people virtually answer, Nothing 
at all. 

They do not so answer with their lips; they make 
no sound. But they just go on thoughtlessly about 
the routine trivialities of life and never pause to listen 
to the cry of the Crucified. I do not despise the 
trivialities of life, the little things. These have their 
place, but they have grown out of their place when they 
shut out from us the great issues of life and death. 
And the tragedy of the world to-day is not so much 
that many m.en are wdcked but that most men are 
thoughtless outside their own immiediate selfish con¬ 
cerns. They say: VtTat have I to do with it? It is 
no concern of mine. Let me go on with my eating 
and drinking, my sleeping and waking, my enjoyments 
and my money-m-aking. Just leave me alone. And 
there it is-—just these things the soldiers also did. 

Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? We 
might as well be honest about it and answer, Next to 
nothing at all. We go our way in life, and we sink into 
our tracks. And we are apt to think that the little 
ruts we have made for ourselves are all the world there 
is. We hardly ever take a glimpse over the edge, 
and yet beyond is the great world, where evil men and 
proud men and greedy men and lustful men are cruci- 
fying Christ afresh in his little ones. It was so in 
1914. 

We were all in our little ruts content with our 
little worlds, asking only to be left alone in peace. 


“THESE THINGS THE SOLDIERS DID” 199 

But just over the edge was the great heaving life of 
men, and the proud and the greedy and the evil in¬ 
trigued and schemed and pushed the world over the 
precipice into the depths of hell; and Christ was cruci¬ 
fied in the boys who were slain, who paid with their 
lives the awful price of the wickedness of men. Are we 
going to settle down into our tracks once more, making 
snug little ruts for ourselves, and let the Herods and 
the Pilates and the Caiaphases play their old game un¬ 
disturbed and run the world of man through the old 
cycle of chicane and gi’eed and backstairs intrigue until 
once more the weight of iniquity sinks us into the abyss 
and Christ is nailed to the tree? Is it nothing to you, 
all ye that pass by? 

At your last reckoning it will avail you little to say 
that you did not do it. “What then did you do?'' “I 
did nothing, I went on with my business, looking after 
my own interests." These things the soldiers did also 
—the old story over again. The sin of those who stand 
by consenting, doing nothing to prevent it, is no less 
than the sin of those who do the evil thing. You may 
not have lifted a hand to crucify Christ, but as you did 
not lift a hand to stay the deed, you have made your¬ 
self the accomplice of murderers and his blood is on 
your head. 

Lord God of this world of meriy mercifully deliver 
us from all indifference and insensibility. Shake us out 
of the selfish complacency which dulls our spirits and 
hardens our hearts. And grant that we may have spirits 
sensitive to the deep need of man, feet swift and hands 
eager to do the redeeming tasks of Thy Kingdom. 
Amen. 



* . 

:v. ’* 


i 




%• 




1 '. 



THE QUADRILATERAL OF LIFE 

“The things that are not shaken.” Heb. 13 : 27. 

The Epistle to the Hebrews was written to a 
people who stood in the shadow of a great calamity. 
The undertones of the letter are compounded of the 
tramp of armies and the crack o’ doom. The Roman 
hosts were closing about the Holy City; and it was 
only a matter of time when the walls of Jerusalem 
would be razed to the ground and the last vestige 
of the Jewish state would be obliterated. And to 
Jews all over the world, it seemed like the end of 
the world. It is indeed true that the Jews to whom 
this letter was addressed were Christians and the 
political misfortunes of Jerusalem did not directly 
affect them. But the Holy City was still the center 
of their world—the focus of their universe. It 
symbolized the inherited environment of their minds; 
it was the king-pin which held together the frame¬ 
work of life. It was their metropolis around which 
sentiment and devotion, patriotism and history, 
had gathered, the native setting of their national and 
religious faith. Throughout their wide dispersion, 
their hearts cherished the remembrance of Jerusalem, 
whether they were still Jews or Christians. The com¬ 
ing fall of Jerusalem looked like the last setting of the 
sun. 

And this letter was written to comfort them, to 
brace them for the inevitable hour. And the burden 


202 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

of the comfort is this: After all, Jerusalem was only 
the foreshadowing; you possess the reality. Mount 
Zion was but a type, a symbol; you have found the 
thing itself. The Holy City may be destroyed; but 
you are standing within the City of the Living God. 
The old Jerusalem in all its glory was but the sign and 
promise of the New Jerusalem where your citizenship 
now is. It is sad to see the old walls tumbling down 
and the city desolate; but it is sharing the lot of all 
temporal things. But your feet are planted in the 
eternal. And all this was foretold long ago. When 
the prophet said, “Yet once more will I make to trem¬ 
ble not the earth only but also the heaven, he was 
speaking of this thing that is about to happen. But 
you are not involved in this tragedy; for we have 
“received a Kingdom which can not be shaken.^^ 
I remember speaking to a friend, a man of deep, 
quiet mind, in the early days of August, 1914, and he 
said to me: “You and I will never live to see the end 
of this;'^ and I imagine that he was right. What 
happened in Jerusalem in 70 A. D. was a mere storm 
in a teacup compared to what happened in Europe 
between 1914 and 1919; and there are few of us now 
living—none probably save the very young—who 
will outlive the reverberations of that terrific upheaval. 
The President of the United States has spoken more 
than once of a return to normalcy; but if his standard 
of the normal is the world before August 1914, he 
is dreaming the emptiest of dreams. To that world 
we can never go back, for what has happened in the 
interval can never be undone. And the upheaval was 
so radical and widespread that we shall need to settle 


THE QUADRILATERAL OF LIFE 203 

down to the expectation that, for the rest of our lives, 
we shall have to spend our time in a world in a state 
of flux. As the years go on, the pace will relent; for 
the last few years we have been living in a sort of 
cataract, and we have yet a long time to spend in the 
rapids before we come to a kindlier stream. We shall 
spend our days in a restless, uneasy world. 

And if you tell me that that is the view of pessi¬ 
mism, my only answer is that it is the judgment of 
historical realism. The mills of God grind slowly. 
When on that fateful day in Jerusalem the Jews chose 
Barabbas rather than Jesus, they were sealing the 
fate of their nation, as Jesus had foreseen. But it 
took forty years for that decision to work out to its 
grim conclusion, and the Jews are paying the price of 
it still. And no one who studies the course of history 
in the large is ignorant of the long range at which the 
great upheavals work. After the sack of Rome, the 
world was in confusion for four wild centuries. And 
it is useless to deceive ourselves into supposing that a 
new world is waiting for us round the next corner. 
There is an inveterate, apocalyptic kink in our minds 
which tempts us to look for the sunrise at every 
turn. We supposed that the Irish agreement last 
December meant peace in Ireland; but you can not 
wipe out centuries of bitterness and rancor overnight; 
and we know now that Irish peace means hard work 
and patience for many a long year. A few months ago 
all eyes were fastened on Genoa; to-day, with less 
confidence, they are turned toward The Hague. It 
took only a few days to turn the life of the world up¬ 
side down and to drench the earth with blood; but 


204 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

it will need as many centuries to set the world up 

solidly on its feet once more. 

And I would say that if our peace and happiness 
rested upon the stability of external things, we would 
be in for a very miserable time. If the joy of life 
were contingent upon governments, markets, and other 
institutions, we should be in a very bad and hopeless 
way. But thank God, it does not. There are those 
things, as this unknown letter-writer says, ''which are 
not shaken.” And the peace and joy of life depend 
upon these unchanging things—the things that stand 
when the earthquake is over, the great permanences 
of life. I want to turn your minds to these things 
to-day. Amid the ebb and flow, the assaults and 
alarms, the chances and changes of our life in this up¬ 
rooted world, there are certain fixed points, certain 
immutabilities upon which your minds can rest. 
And of these there are four concerning which I desire 
to speak; and these four I propose to state in words 
that carry an authority which man could not pos¬ 
sess. 

I. Till Heaven and earth pass away^ not one jot 
or tittle of the law will pass till all he fulfilled. By which, 
I understand Jesus to mean that that body of prin¬ 
ciples that have to do with the determination of right 
and wrong—what we sometimes call the moral order— 
has a permanent and unchanging validity. In Jesus' 
day the moral order was embodied in an institution 
called the Law; but for the Law as an institution Jesus 
had no great concern. In fact, he likened it to an old 
wine-skin that was cracking and bursting under the 
stress of a new life. But the profound difference be- 


THE QUADRILATERAL OF LIFE 205, 

tween Right and Wrong which is written deep into the 
substance of life and which becomes clearer from age 
to age in its definition—this was to Jesus one of the 
permanent and unshifting facts of life. Now we know 
that in conduct there is a distinction to be drawn be¬ 
tween the essential and the accidental, between the 
central and the marginal. There is an area of life in 
which the difference between right and wrong is con^ 
tingent and relative, that is to say, some things may 
be right here and now, and may be wrong under other 
circumstances. But there is a central area in which 
the difference between right and wrong is absolute 
and fixed. And there is a corresponding distinction of 
absolute right and absolute wrong in our own minds— 
that fact which we call conscience. The first secret of 
peace is to respect this distinction and to order our 
lives on the right side of it. This is the first corner¬ 
stone of the house of life; and the only foundation 
on which it can stand. The builders of old Rome said 
they were building for eternity, a rash claim for men 
to make whose masonry was of perishable stone. Yet 
their masonry has stood the wars and storms of cen¬ 
turies surprisingly well. But their political masonry 
was not so good; and only that which stood on a 
foundation of right has stood the gales of history. 
So it must ever be—build the house of life, the lesser 
house of the soul and that larger house of society, on a 
basis of acknowledged Right and the house will stand; 
but build it on any compromise with evil, build it with 
any shoddy of party intrigue or wirepulling, graft 
or oppression, and your house will come tumbling 
down upon your head in ruin. 


206 


THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 


For Right is Right, since God is God, 

And Right the day must win— 

and only the Right; and you may hitch your wagon to 
that star as the surest, the most abundantly and pre¬ 
cisely verified fact in the history of the race. 

II, Heaven and earth may pass away, hut my words 
shall never pass away. By which I think that Jesus 
meant at bottom that Truth was another of the great 
immutabilities. Not that any particular body of 
truth is permanent or final. If he had lived to-day 
Jesus would put the matter in this way: that there is a 
distinction to be made between the truth and men's 
perception of the truth. He would not agree with 
some of us who suppose that the truth we hold is the 
perfect and final truth. I imagine that he would have 
thought that kind of thing rather ridiculous. What he 
did mean was that there is a truth of life; and that, as 
this truth is continually and increasingly revealed to 
men, it remains a permanent possession, and a touch¬ 
stone and a criterion of all further revelation. Which 
at bottom brings you to this—that this is a world in 
which the truth is going to win out and nothing else. 
And that is why we can always afford to let opinion 
be freely expressed and discussed. When I see a bigot 
or an intolerant man, I know that I am looking at a 
man who loves the truth without believing in it. Un¬ 
less of course it be that he is afraid of it and does not 
want it to come out into the daylight. And you may 
be sure that any view, however you may dislike it, 
that has elements of truth in it is going to win out, 
however you may try to suppress it. And if it has no 
elements of truth in it, it will die of itself and you need 


207 


THE QUADRILATERAL OF LIFE 

not trouble yourself about it. But you have to re¬ 
member that this is a growing world, and that you are 
going to be confronted with new ideas all the way. 
Some of them will be true and some will be untrue, 
and our common danger is that, in trying to resist 
the untrue, we should miss some new revelation of the 
truth without which we can not live. We shall de¬ 
stroy the wheat with the tares, and, as Jesus said, the 
thing to do with them is to leave both alone until har¬ 
vest time, and then they will sort themselves out with¬ 
out much difficulty. The untrue will of itself wither, the 
true will thrive and abide. You can not build a per¬ 
manent house of life if you are either afraid of or 
afraid for the truth. The one thing that we have to 
fasten on and hold on to with both hands is that the 
truth can look after itself, and that it will always 
win out in the end. The only trouble is that we men 
are such fools that it so often has to win out in our 
teeth, and that we invite so much tribulation for our¬ 
selves by trying to defend it from itself. 

III. Now abide faith, hope, charity, these three, 
and the greatest of these is love. You will remember that 
the connection in which these words were written was 
this: Paul is speaking of the special gifts of knowledge 
and utterance that had been given to the early Church, 
but there had been some controversy about them. 
And Paul takes the point up and shows them these 
things were only temporary and provisional, and the 
thing that would still remain after these had disap¬ 
peared would be character. It is true that the things 
that Paul was discussing have only a faint antiquarian 
interest for us. The gift of tongues does not excite us. 


208 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

but Paul's point is all the same quite valid. For when 
you or I come to appraise a man's prosperity, or to 
conceive the end of a nation, do we not invariably 
think of them in terms of goods that are perishable? 
Do not we think of personal good in terms of money, 
of national good in terms of power, prestige, and 
commercial expansion—the most utterly perishable 
things on God's earth? Paul may say that tongues 
will cease and knowledge may pass away, but with 
more assurance than Paul we may say that money will 
perish, that power will fade away, and commercial 
expansion will some day be only a tale that is told. 
And so with more certainty than Paul we may draw 
the same moral: There remain faith, hope, love, these 
three —that is, the one permanent human endowment, 
the one imperishable human achievement, is character. 

IV. Wherefore we, receiving a kingdom that can 
not he shaken. Observe that we have discovered three 
of the immutabilities—Right, Truth, Character; and 
here we have a fourth which is perhaps less easy to 
define. But it obviously refers to some inward in¬ 
alienable gift of a spiritual kind that was not going to 
be affected by the catastrophe that was about to over¬ 
take Jerusalem. The word kingdom here is a little 
misleading and plainly can not be meant in the ordi¬ 
nary sense. Kingship, rather than kingdom, expresses 
the writer's meaning. We are kings—^yet since we are 
all kings, not exercising authority over others, but over 
ourselves. It means that we have won our own souls, 
that we have found ourselves, that we have staked 
out of the great terrain of life a little empire which is 
oim own souls—separate, distinct, self-realized. Now 


THE QUADRILATERAL OF LIFE 209 

I am not concerned with how this is done—my only 
word on that point is that this seems to me to be the 
natural consequence of that great decisive surrender 
to God for which the Christian Gospel calls. It is 
that saving of life which is the prize of losing it. It is 
the achievement, the conquest of personality—the 
power to say 7 ,1 live, the finding and the realizing of 
one's own true selfhood. 

Now this is a greater matter than I can discuss at 
this point, but, as I move about among men, I observe 
this above all other things, that they have not found, 
do not know and possess themselves. Yet of all 
possessions, the one durable, inalienable and inde¬ 
structible possession is one's own soul. And every 
man is a pauper until he has achieved his own per¬ 
sonality, he is the prey of every fear, and a mere item 
in the herd. But when he has found himself, when he 
has espied that pearl of great price, the immeasurable 
treasure of his own soul, he stands on his own feet, 
unafraid and unashamed. It matters not what 
storms may break, what clouds may gather, what 
wars and rumors of wars may beat upon him, what 
tumults and shoutings may make the day hideous, he 
stands, sure, confident, unmoved in the unassailable 
security of his own regal, unconquerable soul. 

Right, Truth, Character, Personality—these four 
things can not be shaken. They make the great 
quadrilateral of life, the four cornerstones of the house 
of life, the four gospels of the Christ that is to be. And 
to do right, to follow after truth, to achieve character, 
to win personality—he that doeth these things shall 
never be moved. 




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THE THIRST OF GOD 


When Jesus said, “I thirst,what do you suppose 
he was thirsting for? That his mouth was parched as 
desert sand it is not hard to believe. But we should be 
greatly mistaken if we supposed that that was all the 
thirst he had or the only thirst that he was speaking 
of. It was the old thirst that he had when he looked 
out upon the multitudes and had compassion upon 
them because ‘They were as sheep having no shepherd. 
It was the thirst that was heavy upon him when he 
looked upon the obstinacy of the Pharisees and said, 
“Ye will not come to me that ye might have life.” It 
was the thirst that once drew from him that gracious 
word—“Come unto me, all ye that labor and are 
heavy laden.” It was the thirst of the Redeemer for 
a lost world. It was the agonized thirst of a frustrated 
love. 

But, it was even more than that. For whatever 
view you may take of the person of Christ, the fact 
remains that in him perfect love lived and suffered 
and died. His word was as the word of God, and his 
thirst as the thirst of God. We have heard a great 
deal of discussion of man^s thirst for God, but a good 
deal less of God^s thirst for man. Yet the one is as 
real as the other. The theology of the past gave us an 
Absolute for our God, sufficient unto Hinaself, needing 
nothing that His creature might have to give, a 
Deity who lived 


212 


THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 


“On heights too high for our aspiring, 

Coldly sublime, intolerably just.” 

That was simply because we took our God from the 
philosophers and forgot that the prophets were safer 
guides in a matter of that kind. And even worse 
than that, we forgot that the God of Jesus was spoken 
of as a father—which if it means anything at all means 
that the God we worship is not sufficient unto Himself. 
For what father is there who is fulfilled without the 
love of his children? 

But this is the tragedy of this world and the 
tragedy of God, that the children denied their love 
to their Father; and if the Christian Gospel is to be 
trusted to give a correct account of the miUtter, then 
the Father has been pre-occupied with nothing so 
much as with winning back His children’s love. The 
Bible is nothing but the story of a Father in search of 
His children—leaving no stone unturned to bring 
them back to His heart, and multiplying the pledges 
of His love in order to break down their contumacy. 
He sent them prophets and teachers. He sent them the 
gifts of His providence and His grace. He bore greatly 
and gently with their rebellion, and when He had 
done all that could be done with no avail. He said, 'T 
will send them My Son, they will hear him.” But, so 
far from hearing the Son, they treated him as they 
had treated the rest. Here, '‘he was despised and 
rejected of men, a man of sorrows, and acquainted 
with grief.” I do not think that we begin to under¬ 
stand the acuteness and the urgency of the thirst of 
God for His children, to appreciate that this is the 
great fact that lies beneath the whole history of our 


THE THIRST OF GOD 


213 


race, that the be^nning and the end of all God's 
dealings with man is the reconciliation of His wayward 
and wilful child to Himself. He is the shepherd who 
goes out into the wilderness and into the mountains in 
search of the sheep that was lost, and seeks until he 
find it. 

And none of the ransomed ever knew 

How deep were the waters crossed, 

in this divine quest of the wandering soul. 

This thought has been embodied in two great 
modem poems, Francis Thompson's ''The Hound of 
Heaven" and John Masefield's "The Everlasting 
Mercy." Both tell the story of the pursuit of the 
sinner by the unyielding implacable Love of God, a 
love that does not desist from its seeking until it has 
come upon its quarry and has brought the mnaway 
to his laiees. This is the essence of the Gospel, that 
the love of God is out a-hunting, hunting sinful men, 
not as a judge's officer might, to bring them to the 
bar of justice, but as a Father might, that He might 
gather them to His heart. It is, as the hymn says, the 
love that will not let me go. And it is the love which 
shines forth like the sun from the Cross of Calvary. 
God commendeth His love toward us in this that while 
we were yet sinners Christ died for us. God did not 
find it good enough to sit at home to await the prodi¬ 
gal's return. He went out to the far country to fetch 
him home. And that is the essential meaning of 
Advent. God was in Christ reconciling the world 
unto Himself; and the thirst of the Cross was a reve¬ 
lation in little of that implacable thirst of the heart 


214 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

of God for the restoration of His children to Himself. 

0 Thou who art more athirst for our love than we are 
for Thiney forgive us our blindness and foolishness. 
Of Thy great mercy, show us our need of Thee and Thy 
need of us; persuade us that Thou madest us for Thyself 
and that neither Thou nor we are at rest until Thou 
find us and we find Thee, Even now, Thy Love is pur¬ 
suing us; unveil the face of the Pursuer, even Thine own 
face, that we may joyfully submit to Thy capture of us. 
Amen, 


THE FOOLISHNESS OF GOD 

If the Cross is a true reflection of the Eternal 
Wisdom, if it is (as one has said) 'The ground plan of 
the Universe,'' then most of us are standing on our 
heads and seeing the world upside down. 

Stand before the Cross, and consider. 

We need not take the crowd too seriously; it was 
just like any hum.an crowd, ignorant, curious, led by 
the nose, shouting the catchword of the moment, 
stampeded into madness by men who should have 
known better. But there are two companies in the 
multitude you will do well to observe carefully. 

The first is a group of ecclesiastical persons, 
grave, severe, resolute, who look on with a grim 
satisfaction. Their authority has been shaken by the 
subversive doctrines of this Galilean fanatic; and it 
was their business as the custodians of sound religion 
to suppress him and put him out of the way. They 
set the appropriate machinery in motion; and this 
troubler of Israel would trouble them no more. 

The second is a group of political persons, officers, 
soldiers, representatives of the Roman power, symbols 
and custodians of law and order. You can say nothing 
much about them except that they went about their 
task with the passionless efficiency of government 
officials. But this fellow threatened to break the 
peace and make trouble; and the mills of law were 
grinding him to powder. 


jV 







THE COLONY OF HEAVEN 


When Alaric and his Goths sacked Rome in A. D.- 
406, St. Augustine sat down to write his great work on 
the City of God. He saw how the earthly city had 
been laid in the dust; and he comforted his fellow- 
Christians by saying that their true city was eternal 
in the heavens, high above the vexing vicissitudes of 
history. Here, said he, we are but pilgrims on our 
way home; and the Church on earth is the “pilgrim 
city of God.” Here we have no continuing city, we 
are wayfarers and travelers. 

But this was not St. PauFs view. “We are,” said 
he to the Philippians, “a colony of heaven”—which is 
Dr. MoffatPs happy rendering of the words usually 
translated “our citizenship is in heaven.” The city of 
Philippi had been founded as a Roman colony. 
Wheresoever the Romans had added new territory to* 
the empire, they created there a settlement of veterans 
whose business it was to assimilate the new territory 
and to make the city-colony as much as possible a 
counterpart of the Imperial City itself. Their city 
was to be a sort of distant suburb of Rome, where all 
the Roman customs would be observed and the tradi¬ 
tions and rites duly honored. The colonists were to 
regard themselves as missionaries of the empire, 
apostles of the imperial culture. 

That, says St. Paul, is what we Christians are, 
only we have a fairer and a nobler empire. We are a 


216 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

That is the wisdom of this world, with its blind 
belief in punishment, suppression, reprisal, its sad 
illusions, its tragical self-deceptions, its fatuous error 
that you can get a quiet life by force and coercion. 

And the criminal, what of him? 

He looks down on these men, blind leaders of the 
blind, mistaken custodians of religion and order, with 
a pitiful eye. And as he looks, he prays: ''Father, 
forgive them, for they know not what they do.” 

And again, out of his agony he cried: I thirst. 
Do not suppose that he spoke of a physical thirst 
that human compassion could quench. It was deep, 
unutterable longing, insatiable und 3 dng heart-hunger 
for love, for the winning of these men who hated him 
and did him to death. It was the imperious redemptive 
passion of the heart of God ''forced through the 
channels of a single heart.'^ 

And that is the foolishness of God—that He has 
set out to conquer this race of wayward anarchic men 
and women with this strange armament of forgiveness 
and redeeming love. 

And to-day—who cares about Caiaphas? Or 
Pilate? Yet the criminal has "a name which is 
above every name." 

Truly the foolishness of God has proved wiser 
than men; and perhaps some day we shall believe 
it. 

But until we believe it and live it, we shall go on 
making a mess of God's world. 

0 Thou whose foolishness is wiser than men, grant 
us eyes to see and minds to understand the things that 
belong to our peace. Deliver us from the dulness of 


THE FOOLISHNESS OF GOD 


217 


mr worldly-wisdom and from the credulities of our 
rationalism, and give us the mind of Christ Bestow 
upon us the invincibility and patience of Love, and help 
us ever to face evil with a good will that never fails or 
yields. Amen. 



1 

I 

I 

I 

1 

1 







THE COLONY OF HEAVEN 


When Alaric and his Goths sacked Rome in A. 
406, St. Augustine sat down to write his great work on 
the City of God. He saw how the earthly city had 
been laid in the dust; and he comforted his fellow- 
Christians by saying that their true city was eternal 
in the heavens, high above the vexing vicissitudes of 
history. Here, said he, we are but pilgrims on our 
way home; and the Church on earth is the ''pilgrim 
city of God.^' Here we have no continuing city, we 
are wayfarers and travelers. 

But this was not St. Paul's view. "We are," said 
he to the Philippians, "a colony of heaven"—which is 
Dr. Moffatt's happy rendering of the words usually 
translated "our citizenship is in heaven." The city of 
Philippi had been founded as a Roman colony. 
Wheresoever the Romans had added new territory to 
the empire, they created there a settlement of veterans 
whose business it was to assimilate the new territory 
and to make the city-colony as much as possible a 
counterpart of the Imperial City itself. Their city 
was to be a sort of distant suburb of Rome, where all 
the Roman customs would be observed and the tradi¬ 
tions and rites duly honored. The colonists were to 
regard themselves as missionaries of the empire, 
apostles of the imperial culture. 

That, says St. Paul, is what we Christians are, 
only we have a fairer and a nobler empire. We are a 


220 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

colony of heaven, a little company of men and women 
settled in this world to assimilate it to the Kingdom 
of Heaven. Just as Philippi is there to Romanize 
Macedonia, so you are in Philippi to Christianize 
Philippi and Macedonia and the whole empire and win 
them into the Empire of Christ. 

We are pilgrims, says St. Augustine; we are settlers, 
says St. Paul. We are sojourners, says the one; we 
are colonists, says the other. Which of the two is 
right? The answer surely is that both are right. 

* * 

Matthew Arnold used to inveigh against the 
temper that he called ''other-worldliness.^' It is the 
sort of religion that says with melodious resignation, 
‘T'm but a stranger here,^^ or 

“O Land of Rest, for thee I sigh! 

When will the moment come, 

When I shall lay my armor by 
And rest in peace at home?” 

There are people indeed who have every right thus to 
feel and to sing about this world; there are probably 
times in the life of most people when expressions of 
this kind are natural and legitimate. Yet for normal 
folk in normal times, it is an attitude essentially un¬ 
healthy. There is something wrong with folk who can 
see with perfect clearness and sing with a sort of ec¬ 
stasy about the pearly gates and the golden streets 
of the New Jerusalem, and can not see the dirty and 
mean streets of their own home town, and do nothing 
to have them cleaned and brightened up. I imagine 
that there is not going to be much New Jerusalem at 


221 


THE COLONY OF HEAVEN 

the end for those people, however pious, who have 
not done their part in making New York and Boston 
here and now a little more like the distant city of 
their hopes. 

Yet the tendency to eliminate from our scheme of 
life the vision of fulness and wholeness of life in the 
hereafter makes for poverty. Some of us—and I 
count myself among these—have hitherto found life 
so full of joy and good that we are perhaps a little slow 
to sympathize with those whose experience of life has 
been of a sort to make them long for an escape from it.. 
But even we the fortunate ones can not look upon the 
spectacle of human pain and misfortune without de¬ 
manding within ourselves that there shall be some 
provision for redressing the balance of life. An Eng¬ 
lish journalist once on a visit to Ireland asked a bowed 
old peasant what he most longed to see; and the old 
man grimly answered, 'The Day of Judgment, sir.^^ 

I think I can understand that feeling; and I can un¬ 
derstand the feeling of those who, wearied by the bur¬ 
den of life, and worn by its labors, look expectantly 
for the day when they shall enter upon rest. More¬ 
over, those who labor to build Jerusalem in this life 
know that the work is inconceivably slow, and suf¬ 
fers arrests and setbacks all the time, and at the end 
they will have to say with Cecil Rhodes—though in a 
nobler cause—"So little done, so much to do.^' It is 
not easy to escape despair and heartbreak if one may 
not be sustained through the years of travail by the 
promise of rest and realized and completed life. Life 
is short, and art is long, says the old word; and the 
supreme art—the art of recreating a world—is slow' 




222 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

and long beyond words. It is well for us to remember 
that, though we may do no more than lay a stone or 
two in the masonry of the City of our dreams, we have 
a personal destiny yet to be achieved, fulness and 
wholesomeness of life awaiting us in the New Jerusalem 
beyond the veil, away from the broken and partial 
life of time, with its despairs and sorrows, where there 
is no more death or crying, and God shall wipe away 
all tears from our eyes. 

Yet let us ever remember that it is not impossible 
to live in these two worlds at the same time. Some 
are able to do it. William Blake and Francis Thomp¬ 
son did it. I once met George Russell, the Irish poet. 
He is the man who, with Sir Horace Plunkett, is 
chiefly responsible for the present economic prosperity 
of rural Ireland, the great advocate of co-operative 
farming. Yet when I talked to this man, it was of this 
inner world beyond the world of sense that he spoke, 
in which he lived familiarly and saw things that could 
scarcely be uttered. And I think it is possible to live 
in the New Jersualem of the Spirit what time we are 
building the New Jerusalem of human society. After 
all, the veil is very thin; and the best life of all is to 
live on that frontier line where we can see gleams of 
a light that never was on land or sea, where we can 
hear snatches of the songs of heaven, and to dwell so 
near the Unseen that we may sense something here 
and now of those things which eye hath not seen, nor 
ear heard, which have not entered into the heart of 
man, but which God hath prepared for them that love 
Him. And it is just those who live closest to this 
hidden New Jerusalem who will labor best for the 


THE COLONY OF HEAVEN 223 

building of that New Jerusalem which is to be here in 
this earth, the wide and hallowed home of man. 

Fathery in Earth and in Heaven, who hast made tis 
at the same time pilgrims and colonists, give us to share 
the labor by which Thy Kingdom shall come and Thy 
Will be done, on earth as in heaven. Hold before our 
eyes the lovely form of the City to which we belong; and 
keep us ever mindful that we gain the Eeternal City only 
as we seek to redeem this world of time from sin and 
misery and to give it the likeness of the City that hath 
the foundations, eternal in the heavens. Amen. 


1 


•1 

I 

I 


1 


THE SPIRIT IN THE WHEELS 

0 

It is a good Sunday afternoon's recreation to try 
to work out the symbolism of the first chapter of 
Ezekiel. Under the figure of the four living creatures, 
Ezekiel is drawing a sort of composite picture of life 
as a whole. For him, life has four main kingdoms— 
the human, typified by the man's face, the ivild beast, 
typified by the lion, the beast of the field, typified by 
the ox, and the bird of the air, typified by the eagle. 
All of these are informed and governed by a single 
spirit—the spirit of life (observe the marginal read¬ 
ing). The wheels seem to signify the processes of 
life; and the processes are impelled and controlled 
by the same spirit. And you may infer, if you choose, 
from the symbolism of the chapter that the prophet 
intends to convey a vision of life as a single whole, 
but under a variety of forms, and to suggest the 
universality as well as the essential unity of its proc¬ 
esses. But it is the peculiar quality of symbolism 
of this kind, whether you find it here or in the Apoca¬ 
lypse or in Blake's prophecies or in John Bunyan's 
Holy War, that no single line of interpretation covers 
the whole ground. No single key opens every door 
into the writer's meaning. And certainly here the 
ultimate meaning is not reached until we have con¬ 
nected up the symbolism of the latter part of the 
chapter. For there we are led to the final source of 
the spirit of life in God. The noise of the wings of the 


226 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

four living creatures was like the voice of the Almighty, 
and the spirit of life that was in the wheels was none 
other than the Spirit of God. 

Now it would be possible to find here a starting 
point for a discussion of some important matters—as, 
for instance, the doctrine of the Divine Immanence, 
or the doctrine of Evolution, or indeed if we took the 
symbolism of the wheels very literally, remembering 
that wheels revolve, we might even find some sugges¬ 
tions concerning revolution. But I want to narrow 
the issue to a more immediate and practical point, 
and to go somewhat beyond a strict interpretation of 
EzekieFs symbols. I want to think specially of the 
wheels of human life, of the main processes by which 
life is maintained among men, and of God in these 
wheels of human life. 

There is a sense in which we may say that God is 
always present in all the processes of life—that is 
what we mean when we speak of the Divine Imma¬ 
nence. That is also what we mean by saying that we 
live in a moral universe, a universe which reflects and 
embodies the nature of God. Your poets and seers 
will tell you that they find this presence in all things 
that are. William Blake once said, “When I look 
upon the rising sun, what do I see? A round disc of 
fire—Oh no! no! but a great multitude of the heav¬ 
enly host, saying Holy, Holy, Holy!’’ You will re¬ 
member Mrs. Browning’s line about “every common 
bush aflame with God,” and Francis Thompson’s 
flaming affirmation that he saw his God, “lo there, lo 
here, ah me, lo everywhere!” And it is a somewhat 
singular and suggestive reflection how much more 



227 


THE SPIRIT IN THE WHEELS 

easily the poets have been able to see God in nature 
than in man. William Blake indeed speaks of the 
''human form divine;’' and it is (by the way) not im¬ 
possible that he got the idea from this chapter, where 
the throne is occupied by the likeness of a man. One 
or two others there are who have spoken of the di¬ 
vinity of man; but on the whole the revelation of God 
in man has not been so obvious as the revelation in the 
beauty and power of nature. And the reason is not 
far to seek; for man of all God’s creatures is the only 
one who can deny his God and drive Him out of his 
life. This is indeed the tragedy of our race, that, 
choosing our own will rather than His, we have hid¬ 
den Him from ourselves and from one another, when 
we should see the Shekinah gleaming on the breast of 
every common man and every passing face aflame 
with God. And yet we can not get away from God. 
Soon or late we come upon Him. I have read some¬ 
where that the man who first discovered and said 
"Honesty is the best policy,” was a business man who 
had had his fingers burned in a crooked transaction. 
He had made the tremendous discovery that the 
universe was a moral thing, and a living thing which 
turned upon those who didn’t play the game according 
to the rules; he had found that God was in the wheels. 
I sometimes wonder whether the market-place has not 
been a more effectual school of morals than the 
Church. At least it seems ordained that we have to 
learn the things that belong to our peace through our 
broken hearts and our burnt fingers. Alas that we 
should be such dull scholars! And yet how many of 
us have not learned in our own experience that if we 


228 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

SOW the wind we reap the whirlwind? Have we not 
learned from history and observation a hundred times 
that 

“The moving finger writes, and having writ 
Moves on. Not all your piety or wit 
Can lure it back to cancel half a line, 

Nor all your tears wash out a word of it.” 

No, God is in the wheels. ^'Whither shall I go,'' 

cried the Psalmist, '‘from thy spirit? Oh whither shall 

I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven 

thou art there; if I make my bed in Sheol, behold thou 

art there. If I take the wings of the morning and 

dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there 

shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold 

me." But remember that He is always there in the 

wheels, yet not to crush us; and it is His very love that 

lets our hands be burned and our hearts be broken. 

For by all this He means to bring us back to Himself. 

He is in the wheels as the Love that will not let us go, 

the love that like a "hound of heaven" in Francis 

Thompson's daring image is forever pursuing us that it 

may capture us and bring us back to His own heart. 

We sometimes think of religion as seeking God, but 

that is only a part of it; the other and the greater part 

is that God is seeking us—pursuing us "down the days 

and down the nights," "down the arches of the years," 

"down the labyrinthine ways of our own minds"— 

seeking like the shepherd until He find us. 

* * 

But there is another sense in which God is not 
in the wheels, unless we (if one may so speak) put Him 


THE SPIRIT IN THE WHEELS 229 

there. For it is a way we have to take the running of 
the wheels into our own hands and run them for ends 
of our own that are not God^s ends. If I understand 
this symbolism of Ezekiel aright, the ends of God for 
this world are the increase and the unity of life; and 
when we subordinate the wheels to private, selfish, 
particularist, sectional ends, we are expelling God 
from the process of life. And we do (and it is useless 
to deny it) make the wheels run the wrong way—and 
for our pains ride them to disaster. 

Take the wheels of government, for instance. In 
the central lobby of the British House of Commons 
there is inlaid in the tiles in Latin a verse from the 
Psalms, ''Except the Lord build the house, they labour 
in vain who build it.'' And it has always seemed to 
me a verj great thing that there in the very center of 
the British Empire there should be so noble a confes¬ 
sion of faith. But it would be a very blind patriotism 
indeed that would affirm that the British have always 
lived up to this noble credo, that they have not made 
again and again the tragic mistake of identifying ends 
that they desired with the ends of God. But it is not 
they alone who have done these things. Here you 
have the besetting sin of all statecraft—at its worst, 
serving 

“Thy cruel patriarchal pride, 

Planting thy family alone, 

Destroying all the world beside,” 

and ever since the days of Macchiavelli subordinating 
truth and the moral order to the exigencies of selfish 
and exclusive policies. And yet the God without 


230 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

whom we build the house in vain is the one God and 
Father of us all, who is in us all, the God who has made 
of one all nations of the earth; and it is upon this 
foundation alone that the house of life can be safely 
built, the only house which the Lord will build with us. 
God is in the wheels of no government save that which 
proceeds upon the postulate of an inviolate and uni¬ 
versal human unity. Any form of class legislation, 
the exaltation of nationality above humanity, any 
policy which serves the part against the whole, drives 
God out of the wheels, and soon or late ends in failure 
and disaster—for it is untrue to the ultimate nature 
of things. 

And in the same way, God may be driven out of 
the wheels of commerce. The whole fabric of com¬ 
merce rests upon a social need; its foundation is the 
common human need of food, drink, shelter, clothing, 
heat and light; and, springing from this social need, it 
should be a constructive and creative social service. 
Yet it is the paradox of commerce to-day that it is 
commonly accepted that the one adequate driving 
force and motive of commercial enterprise is personal 
financial gain. ‘This implies a cynical view of human 
nature which I vehemently repudiate, and I repudiate 
it because I know business men who do conceive of 
their business as a social service and who would rather 
perish than take a base selfish advantage of the com¬ 
munity; and during the war we did see a very general 
abandonment of private aims in a common social effort. 
There were indeed a few who were content to fatten 
and to batten on their country's extremity—that 
contemptible company who also in peace bring com- 


THE SPIRIT IN THE WHEELS 231 

merce into disrepute. But I do not believe that you 
can not have great and fruitful commercial enterprise 
except on a basis of private gain. And I believe, more¬ 
over, that we are moving toward a new and better 
philosophy of commerce. I live in the hope that we 
may conceive and speak familiarly of commerce not 
only as a social service but as in a very deep sense a 
sacramental function, a vocation in which a man may 
discharge a full Christian ministry, serving his brethren 
for the love of God. When the philosophy and tech¬ 
nique of commerce are informed by a spiritual valua¬ 
tion of life, then business may become the sacrament 
of religion, the place where a man's religion does most 
signally manifest itself. After all, there is nothing 
common or unclean, nothing secular which is not 
fundamentally sacred, no wheels which are not meant 
to be wheels of God. 

So too with the wheels of industry. For industry 
is a function of life; and here again we have had a 
tragical inversion. Industry has been too much 
subordinated to the production of things at the ex¬ 
pense of life; and God has gone out of its wheels. 
The very conditions of industry have often disabled 
men from enjoying the things that their industry has 
created. '‘The great cry," said Ruskin long ago, 
“that rises from our manufacturing cities is all in very 
deed for this—that there we manufacture everything 
but men. We blanch cotton, we refine sugar, we 
strengthen steel, we shape pottery, but to strengthen, 
or to refine, or to shape a single human soul does not 
enter into our estimate of advantages." Since that 
time the sharpness of the indictment has begun to wear 


232 


THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 


off, but even yet we conceive too much of industry as 
a function in the production of wealth, too little as a 
function in the increase and enrichment of life, and so 
far the wheels are without God. And yet how glori¬ 
ously God might be in these wheels! Do you re¬ 
member the old Scots engineer MacAndrew in Kip¬ 
ling’s poem who saw predestination in the stroke of 
the piston-rod? Yes, God’s mind and hand are surely 
there—in the thrust of the lever, in the pressure of the 
steam, in the hum of the million machines that make 
the things that men live by. Yes, God’s mind and 
hand are there—in those wheels—but alas that His 
love should not be there as well! Every new manu¬ 
facturing machine that is invented is an extension of 
the creative impulse of God; would that like the first 
creation it were also a revelation and an organ of the 
love of God! And so it might indeed be—if only we 
lived by the Spirit, if only we ordered life by God’s 
valuation of it. Godless wheels must needs be in¬ 
human wheels; and it is chiefly because God has not 
been in the wheels of industry, that industry is to-day 
threatened with a destructive civil war. For war is 
always the conclusion of selfishness on whatever stage 
it operates, the fated Nemesis of the self that sets out 
to take advantage of the whole. 

Thus we might go on. The artificiality, the 
emptiness, the affectation, of social intercourse in our 
day show how little God is in these wheels—precious 
wheels whose business is to bring unity and fellowship 
into life. It moves on a plane so shallow and so trivial 
that it inevitably breeds decadence and corruption 
where it might minister to a noble and massive spirit- 




THE SPIRIT IN THE WHEELS 233 

ual culture. And there are too the wheels of the home- 
life—and with God forgotten, they are crushing the 
home out of existence. Once the home was the focus 
of life, that pole to which wholesome human instinct 
turned faithfully from every point of life's compass; 
but to-day it is hardly more than the dormitory of a 
group of persons whose vital interests seem to be else¬ 
where, and until we bring God back into the wheels 
of home, there will be, there can be, no health in us. 
And then too there are the wheels of religion, and, 
paradox though it be, God may even disappear from 
these wheels. For men may have the form of godliness 
and yet deny the power thereof; and our acts of wor¬ 
ship may be no more than meaningless mouthings 
in an empty tomb. And the desperate devices which 
we have used to keep the churches going anyhow seems 
to show that the power has run out and God is no 
longer in the wheels. 

* ♦ 

This is not cheerful reading, you say. Well, 
after all, it is the part of wisdom to look facts in the 
face; and it is the test of faith whether it can face 
ugly and ominous facts without weakening nay, 
even more, whether it can interpret a desperate and 
difficult position in terms of challenge and opportunity. 
If what I have written is depressing, it is because I 
have failed to reach your faith. For these things 
should stiffen faith, stir it to gird up its loins and brace 
itself for a great task. There are many and promising 
signs in the sky; still we are faced with many and omi¬ 
nous evils; and in these we are to discover the measure 
of our task, the length of the road that lies before us. 



234 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

And yet **they that be for us are greater than they 
that be against us” And I have not written of im¬ 
movable evils; for us indeed there are, there can be, 
no such things. And here least of all. For if God be 
not in the wheels, it is not that He is willingly out of 
them. 

For you may bank confidently upon this one 
thing—that there is nothing that God Himself so 
desires as to come into the wheels of life once more. 
But He wall not force Himself upon us; He made us 
free and He respects the freedom He has given us. 
He will save no man against his will; He will not invade 
our life without our invitation. He comes when we 
want Him—but not before. And the point at which 
He must come into these wayward wheels of life is by 
way of your personal life and mine and by way of our 
personal relationships. If God is to return into the 
wheels of international life, it is not alone that He 
must come into the relationship between, say, France 
and Germany, but by way of the relationship between 
you and me. If He is to come into the wheels of 
commerce and industry. He must find a way not 
through the tangled relations of massed capital and 
massed labor, but through our relations to one another 
at work, the relations between those who work for us 
and those whom we work for. If He is to return to 
the wheels of your Church, you must bring him there 
in your own soul. If He is once more to be the spirit 
in the wheels of the home, we must think of the home 
as a place where we can and should seek Him and find 
Him. There is no short and easy road to that trans¬ 
figuration of life which we all desire. It can not be 


THE SPIRIT IN THE WHEELS 235 

done save by souls dedicated and consecrated to it, 
and who make it their first business to bring God back 
in power into the wheels of the personal life, those 
wheels within wheels which Ezeldel saw, the lesser 
wheels that at last make all the great wheels of the 
world go round. Once more I say, it is up to you 
and me; and as the Lord liveth, let us see to it that we 
do not fail. 



THE FREEDOM OF GOD 

I 

I have a good many premillenarian friends,, 
admirable people in many ways; but I confess that 
I find it more and more difficult to take them seri¬ 
ously when I am in their company. They remind 
me of Mr. Dick, who could not write a letter with¬ 
out referring to King Charles's head. They seem 
to be an obsessed race; and from every point of 
the compass they always return to their idee fixe. 
You may argue with them until break of day, and 
you will make no dent upon them. You may bring, 
heavy documentary evidence to prove that their pet 
obsession is an old story, and that the expectation they 
cherish has been stultified time and again in history. 
But you move them not. There is, I fear, no cure for 
them except the disappointment which is waiting for 
them. But when they have left me I have some other 
thoughts. I wonder whether the strange persistence 
of this adventist emphasis may not hide within itself 
some truth that the rest of us are overlooking. No 
mere illusion could survive such desperate disap¬ 
pointments as this has suffered in the course of the 
Christian ages. It might be well worth inquiring 
whether there is not something in it that the rest of 

us might learn with profit. 

Now it is to be observed that the apocalyptic hope- 
first appeared at a time of political despair. Its 


238 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

farther origins are, I suppose, to be sought in the dim 
obscurities of some forgotten Persian cult, but when 
we find it full grown in the period between the Testa¬ 
ments, it appears definitely as the answer of faith to 
political pessimism. The prophets had looked for the 
deliverance of Israel along the common road of his¬ 
tory, but as that deliverance was long delayed, and 
the Roman tyranny had followed the Greek as that 
had followed the Babylonian, it became clear to the 
religious mind that the Lord had some other plan in 
mind. And building upon the apocalyptic notions 
that had trickled into the Jewish mind through its 
contacts with the oriental world, there grew the 
definite expectation of a deliverer who would come on 
the clouds, clean athwart the normal order of history, 
and who would establish a new order in which Israel 
would not only be proudly independent but would rule 
the nations. This was the popular religious idiom in 
the years before Jesus appeared; and it was from this 
source that the apocalyptic elements that are to be 
found in the New Testament took their rise. 

The student of these things could have predicted 
that this same temper would make its appearance at 
some^ point during the progress of the Great War. 
And it did, as we all know. It first appeared in Mr. 
H. G. Wells. When he made Mr. Britling say “God,'' 
he made articulate the feeling of many ordinary folk. 
The situation at that time seemed to have gone utterlv 
out of hand, and it seemed beyond the power of man 
to cope with it. Since, then, it could not be doubted 
that God cared for His world, the inference was plain 
—surely He will one of these days take the whole 


THE FREEDOM OF GOD 


239 


affair into His own hands and in His own wise way dis¬ 
pose of it. But Mr. Wells is a child in this region; and 
presently came along those who had been studying the 
books of Daniel and the Revelation and had there dis¬ 
covered the whole program. The Lord was going to 
intervene in this mad business by sending His Son on 
the clouds in great power and glory, to establish his 
own personal reign upon the earth. Once more, as 
always, the apocal 5 H)tic hope appears as the answer of 
faith to political despair. 

Now the form of the answer may be irrational and 
grotesque. But the essence of the answer holds a real 
truth that this generation has largely forgotten. We 
have been brought up in an age when the idea of law, 
that is, natural law, has colored all our thinking. We 
have supposed that the affairs of the world are gov¬ 
erned by an iron system of law that never deviates 
from its course and brooks no interference. Ever>"- 
thing is predestined in an unalterable sequence of 
cause and effect, and God Himself would not, even if 
He could, interrupt it. And when we came to apply 
this to history, we pictured human advance as a slow 
affair moving onward ponderously, along a fixed and 
unchangeable road. The mills of God were going 
their imdeviating way; and that was the only way. 
But the essence of the apocalyptic hope is the reminder 
that God is not tied down to the slow processes of 
history, that He is not the slave but the master of His 
laws, and that He can, when and if He will, break across 
the normal order of history and set human affairs upon 
a new course. 

And this is not to-day as absurd as it would have 


240 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

appeared a generation ago. For while it seems still 
true that in the system of inanimate matter there is an 
iron reign of law, it becomes increasingly dangerous to 
speak of anything like fixed law in the world of Life. 
Of course the truth is that now that matter has been 
resolved into a form of energy, we hardly know where 
we are at all, that is, in the philosophy of these things. 
But it does appear that in the regions of Life there is 
something which at the lower levels looks like caprice 
but which in the higher levels has grown into freedom. 
The world of personality is a world of freedom. But 
there is no meaning to my freedom, unless God be as 
free as I am. This upper world is a world not of pre¬ 
determined sequences, but of contingency and choice; 
and in the interplay of the divine freedom with the 
human, who knows what may not happen? It is this 
circumstance that makes prayer a practical proposi¬ 
tion. And it is this faith in the freedom of God that 
underlies the apocalyptic hope. Its moral for us is 
simply this—that we do not need to wait upon the 
slow processes of history to build our City of God, but 
that we can hurry history along and that God will 
take a hand with us in doing so. 

I have plainly pulled down upon my head a good 
deal more than a single paper can contain. To begin 
with I shall need another paper to deal with another 
truth that is hidden in the premillenarian emphasis, 
and then still another to deal with the further implica¬ 
tions of the recovery of the idea of the freedom of 
God. 

Thou who sittest in the high heavens^ yet ‘'whose 
secret presence runs through creation's veins," forgive us 


THE FREEDOM OF GOD 


241 


our small and blundering thought of Thy nature. We 
have suffered ourselves to conceive of Thee as tethered to 
the laws that Thou hast made, forgetting that Thou hast 
kept all power in Thine own hands amd the times and 
seasons in Thine own power. Help us to understand 
that Thou who madest us free art Thyself free: and that 
because Thou art free and we are free, we may share with 
Thee in the travail which hastens Thy Kingdom. A.men. 

II 

I had something to say the other week about the 
freedom of God. The God of this generation has 
been a God tied down to His own laws. And we 
were taught to regard the universe as a huge mech¬ 
anism that marched along its inexorable way, with¬ 
out deviation or change. Within this universe every¬ 
thing went according to program, and it was wholly 
useless to suppose that there would be the slightest 
. departure from the plan. On this showing, it was 
of course useless to pray, unless we frankly reduced 
prayer to a sort of auto-suggestion. To believe 
in miracles was also ruled out, for a miracle, being 
plainly an interference with the natural order, was 
unthinkable. Moreover, there could be nothing in 
the shape of a special providence. The vast machine 
was so intricate and minute in its workings that there 
could from the nature of the case'be no allowance for 
irregularities. But we are not so sure about this as we 
used to be. Indeed, just at this moment we are very 
uncertain about a great many things that a generation 
ago we were quite cocksure about. Now that Einstein 


242 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

has sown seeds of skepticism about those hoary tradi¬ 
tions of ''time'' and "space," which were the very 
cornerstones of our thinking, we are all at sea about 
pretty much everything in this region. But at any 
rate, we do know that in biology there has been an in¬ 
creasing indisposition to speak of anything so hard and 
fast as a "law." All we can safely say is that there are 
tendencies and these tendencies can not be tmsted to 
work out the same result in every case. You never 
can tell just what the impulse of life will do next. And 
the old objection to certain kinds of miracles vanishes, 
for after all the only ground of skepticism about a 
miracle was that it had not happened before. It was 
not according to rule. But what if there was after all 
no rule? 

Anyway, the notion of a uni vernal and fixed "rule 
of law" has been badly discredited; and the neo-Cal¬ 
vinism of Science has gone the way of the old Calvin¬ 
ism. And yet, so far as we can see, it still remains true 
that outside the region of life there is something like 
a grim fixity of process, a kind of predestination— 
so that we can predict the rise and fall of the tide 
and a solar eclipse centuries ahead. But this iron 
regularity does not extend to the world of life. There 
is in that region a margin of indetermination, as the 
philosophers say, which ranges from something like 
caprice in the lower levels to freedom at the upper; and 
within this region anything may happen, whether it 
is on the progi'am or not. 

I help my own mind about these things by think¬ 
ing of an ocean liner. Below in the engine room, you 
have the reign of law. The engines work according 


THE FREEDOM OF GOD 


243 


to plan with a rigid and undeviating regularity. The 
stroke of the piston-rod is predestined as MacAndrews 
said, and, barring accidents, all the machinery pounds 
along according to rule. But up on deck you have the 
realm of freedom. Within the limits of the ship, the 
passengers can move about as they will. They can do 
what they like so long as it does not interfere with the 
navigation of the ship. And then there is the captain. 
He moves about among the passengers, enters into 
conversation with them, hears their complaints. And 
while he does not interfere with the engine room, it is 
he who determines the course of the ship and he can 
alter it as he sees fit. It is like that in the universe. 
It has its engine-room where everything moves by 
stem and fixed necessity—the stars in their courses, 
the law of gravitation, and all the rest. But up above 
is the realm of personality, which is also the realm of 
freedom. The Captain moves among the passengers 
and has fellowship with them, is interested in their 
concerns, and yet all the time He determines and con¬ 
trols the running of the whole ship. 

I know that an illustration is not an argument. 
All I am concerned to show is that within the little 
universe of an ocean liner you may have freedom and 
necessity side by side. And I see no reason to sup¬ 
pose that necessity and freedom can not exist side by 
side without nullifying each other in the universe. 
Though the margin of freedom may be narrow, it is 
enough to give the human spirit all the elbow-room 
it can use. But the real-upshot of all this discussion 
is that it makes religion possible once more. In a 
reign of law there seems to be no place for religion. 


244 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

Of course, there might be a religion of somber acquies¬ 
cence in things as they are, a religion of solemn sub¬ 
mission. But out of that abasement we should hear 
no Voice saying, “Son of Man, stand on thy feet.^^ 
Where you have a free God and a free soul, religion be¬ 
comes creative and dynamic and vital. You can have 
communion, which is the heart and soul of religion. 
You can pray, for your God has not tied His own hands 
so that He can not answer you. You can go out to re¬ 
deem the world in high hopes, because you are living 
in a universe in which your work tells, in which your 
effort is not a vain struggle against intractable and 
predetermined circumstance. And you can recover 
that old temper of child-like trust, for a free God is a 
God who can care for His children and to whom they 
are worth more than many sparrows. 

Science has given us perhaps the most staggering 
paradox that has ever assailed the little mind of man. 
Its first achievement was to show us the unthinkable 
extent of the universe, so that we were lost in its im¬ 
mensity. We were little insignificant midges afloat 
in its vast spaces, and then Science went on to fill this 
universe with a number of things, the ether, force, 
laws—packed it so tight that there was hardly breath¬ 
ing space left for the spirit of man. The great uni¬ 
verse became a prison house, in which the inhabitant 
had no meaning or will of his own. It was a huge, 
closely-articulated machine, and the individual took 
his place as a little cog in the wheel. The splendor of 
the heavens of which poets had sung so ecstatically 
was the pleasant illusion that camouflaged the bleak 
fact. The beauty of hill and river was a cloak for the 


THE FREEDOM OF GOD 


245 


harsh reality. And freedom was the gigantic self- 
deception with which the human spirit drugged itself 
in order to make life tolerable under this appalling 
tyranny of things. But Science has traveled beyond 
this imendurable twilight and is restoring to us our 
freedom, and with our freedom the faith in the freedom 
of God. Life is reassuming its meaning, and prayer 
and work are once more becoming full of the possibility 
and promise of real and fruitful issue. And I imagine 
that by the time our children have grown up, mankind 
will be more intensely religious than it has ever 
been. 

We thank Thee, 0 God, that Thou art still speaking 
to men and that Thou still hearest them when they speak. 
In the thick darkness of partial knowledge, we lost sight 
of Thy face, but as knowledge grows from more to more 
we are beginning again to trace the gracious outline of 
Thy countenance. And lo! it is the face of a Father who 
looks down upon His children, and, in the freedom of an 
infinite love. He calls them to that same life of love and 
freedom. Holy Father, receive Thy stumbling children, 
and make us sure of Thy immediate presence. Amen. 









IS THE SON OF MAN AT THE DOOR? 


Every idea that receives the endorsement of a 
considerable following must have an element of 
truth in it. You may not agree with the idea in the 
form in which it presents itself, but it is a poor and 
futile thing to stand and condemn it. The very 
fact that a number of people believe it entitles it 
to respect from you; and it should excite your curi¬ 
osity. What is it that these people see in it? If, 
for instance, the people who are forever chasing 
radicals and “reds” would take a breathing space 
to ask themselves what these radicals want and why 
they are wanting it, they would make some discoveries 
that would force them to sit down and think—hard. 
In the same way, it does not help when we who have 
been brought up in a liberal school dismiss with a ges¬ 
ture of contempt the “fundamentalists” and pre- 
millenarians and people of that stripe. The funda¬ 
mentalists are not fundamentalizing for fim. They are 
genuinely concerned about some foimdations; and 
they think that some of us are undermining those 
foimdations. I think that we should do something 
about it other than be derisive or impatient. For it 
is a good thing to be anxious about foundations. A 
week or so ago, I tried to show that there was one 
element of great value in the premillenarian faith— 
personally, I do not think that the premillenarians 
themselves recognize it, but it is there nevertheless. 


248 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

It is a sense that God is free, that He is not tied down 
to the normal course of his^ry, that we need not 
therefore in our hope for the world suppose that we 
can not redeem it more rapidly than the slow processes 
of history allow. If we have faith and courage we 
can hustle history along; we can increase its pace, and 
reach the City of God much sooner than we suppose. 
And this is surely a matter of some importance. 

But there is more than this in the premillenarian 
idea. Of course, the purely millenarian content 
arises from that rather ignorant literalism which 
treats a figure of speech as a historical datum. I am 
reminded of the saying that the tragedy of the book 
of Jonah is that it is chiefly known by reason of its 
connection with a whale, and we may adapt the 
saying and add that the tragedy of the Book of the 
Revelation is that it is chiefly known by reason of its 
connection with the numbers 1000 and 666. This 
fashion of interpretation is too trivial to be discussed. 
All the same, if we will dig beneath the superficial and 
accidental elements of the millennial hope, there is 
food for fruitful thought. 

Now, when Jesus speaks of the 'Vetum,'^ or the 
Parousia, as the scholars call it, you will observe that 
he says that it is the Son of Man who is coming. He 
never, so far as I know, speaks of a second coming in 
the first person. The history of this title “Son of 
Man’^ is full of interest. At that time, it was in 
common use, and the Son of Man was expected to 
come on the clouds any day, and sweep the Romans 
into the sea and establish the House of Israel in a proud 
independence. This idea had been derived chiefly 


IS THE SON OF MAN AT THE DOOR? 249 

from an old Jewish scripture called the Book of Enoch, 
in which the coming of the Son of Man in power is 
depicted in great detail. This was not the only book 
of the kind that was in circulation—there was a con¬ 
siderable literature of the ''apocalyptic kind'' about. 
But Enoch was the greatest of them, and it was he 
more than any other that had popularized the idea of 
the coming "Son of Man." Now in adopting this 
name for himself Jesus did a very daring thing. He was 
rendering himself liable to grave misimdemtanding. 
But it had to be done in order to redeem the notion 
of redemption from the temporal and political setting 
into which it had been cast. In doing this, however, 
Jesus was restoring to the name "Son of Man" its 
first content. It had been used first by Daniel in 
the vision of the four beasts. You will recall how 
under the image of the beasts were symbolized the 
four great imperialisms of the ancient world—the 
Assyrian, the Persian, the Greek and the Roman. 
And those are shown as passing away before a new 
imperialism, that of a "Son of Man." The Son of Man 
was doubtless in first intention the Jewish people, 
but even the Jewish people themselves are regarded as 
symbolical of humanity. The significance of Daniel's 
vision is the disappearance of the reign of power before 
the reign of love, the victory of humanism over im¬ 
perialism. 

And this emphasis which had been lost from the 
Book of Enoch is restored by Jesus. His use of the 
name "Son of Man" is unmistakable. He intends by 
it to describe himself as the typical and representative 
man, the embodiment of humanity as a whole. And 


250 


THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 


when he speaks of the return of the Son of Man in 
power, he is to be taken as speaking symbolically of 
any great human happening in which the spirit of man 
has made a great stride forward toward its inheri¬ 
tance of perfect light and perfect freedom. His use 
of the apocalyptic idiom is quite in keeping with his 
general method. The people with whom he spoke were 
incapable of forming general notions; and they had 
to learn them under the form of pictures. That was 
why Jesus spoke to them in parables, and the apoca¬ 
lyptic idiom is simply an expansion of the parable. 
Under this picture of a dramatic and spectacular 
parousiay Jesus was endeavoring to communicate to 
his hearers a truth about a general historical process. 
Indeed, it is fair to infer from his teaching that he 
anticipated more than one parousia. For he speaks 
of 'The days of the Son of Man.'' And there have 
been many of them, and there are many yet to be— 
great signal days when the race strides forth out of 
the bondage of tradition or out of the darkness of 
ignorance into a larger light and a more spacious 
liberty. In every deed, in every word, in every 
thought (no less than in great historical events), 
which have helped a man to be more of a man, there 
is a real coming of the Son of Man. And if our pre- 
millenarian friends have done no more than re¬ 
mind us of this stimulating and reassuring truth, 
surely they have made us greatly their debtors. 

0 Son of Man, we thank thee that thou art forever 
coming to this poor and tried world. We have seen 
thee in the stirring hours of history, and we have met thee 
in the quiet places of life. ''Faith hath still its Galilee, 



IS THE SON OF MAN AT THE DOOR? 251. 

and Love its Olivet” Make us eager to seek thee, quick 
to recognize thee, swift to welcome thee, 0 thou Coming 
One. 





THE ADVENT PARADOX 


They all were waiting for a King 
To slay their foes and lift them high, 

Thou cam’st a little baby thing 
That made a woman cry. 

And though we have had that strange spectacle 
before us for nearly twenty hundred years, we have 
not yet seen the point of it. For when men speak— 
as many men have spoken in these latter days—of the 
'^second^^ coming, they think of the Son of Man as a 
king, coming in all the pomp and display of secular 
royalty. But, unless God has radically changed His 
own nature, the one thing we may be quite sure of is 
that if the Son of Man comes, he will come as he came 
before—in great humility, no king, but a servant, no 
emperor, but just a man among men. 

This fallacy persists because our minds are still 
in the toils of worldly wisdom; we think and speak in 
the idiom of worldliness; and we do not understand 
that the Gospel was God’s contradiction of all our 
worldly values and ways of life. Jesus was the chal¬ 
lenge God threw in the face of old deeply-entrenched 
civilizations, and there was no conventional judgment 
which Jesus did not discard or deny. Into a world 
which worships greatness, he came in the weakness of a 
little child. In a world which is dazzled by pomp and 
glitter, he was laid in a manger, neighbor to the 
cattle. In a world which was drunken with power, he 



254 


THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 


chose to be a servant. In a world in which men paid 
respect to riches, he had not where to lay his head. 
And in a world which cherished respectability, he died 
on a criminars gibbet. All the way and all the time, 
he opposed what he believed to be God's way to the 
world's way, the truth of God to the wisdom of the 
wise. 

And yet in all this he was only living out the 
simple, unsophisticated logic of a pure manhood. 
Just as he came into the world “a little baby thing," 
without pomp or circumstance, so also he lived, com¬ 
promising or obscuring his essential humanity by none 
of the things which we in our folly mistake for the 
real good of life. Would you know what a man's life 
should be like—stripped of all poses and affectations, 
delivered from the false lures that degrade and de¬ 
humanize us, reduced to the pure unspoiled essence of 
the thing—then turn to the Gospels and you shall see; 
and by the same token you shall learn how far short 
we come of being men. Prof. L. P. Jacks in one of 
his sketches makes a certaip character give utterance 
to the view that Jesus was God in so far as he did what 
was not expected and man in so far as he did what 
was. But this is fallacious. In so far as Jesus did 
and said surprising things and unexpected things, it 
was because he was man—man of pure and unspoiled 
manhood; and we find these things surprising and 
unexpected because we are something less than men. 

Yet there is an element of unexpectedness in him 
that springs from another source, from the very genius 
of life itself. We have been in the habit of thinking 
of God in terms of law, and of supposing that His 


- THE ADVENT PARADOX 


255 


operations are governed by an ironclad routine. In 
the world of inanimate matter this is true, so true that 
we can predict the moment of high tide, or the exact 
second of a solar eclipse for centuries ahead. We can 
tell beforehand the precise result of bringing two 
chemical substances together, and so forth. But the 
moment you enter into the realm of life, you pass from 
the realm of the predictable into the realm of the un¬ 
predictable. The whole trend of modern biology is 
toward a view which makes it impossible to speak of 
laws. You can never be sure what life will do next, 
when or where it vdll break out in new forms. It is 
the realm of the unexpected; and that is simply to say 
that it is a realm of freedom. From which I infer that 
God has not tied His hands and that He is as free as 
you and I are free. The God of life is a God of sur¬ 
prises. You can never tell what He will do next; 
the only thing you can be sure of is that, whatever 
He does. He does it in pursuit of His infinite purpose 
of love. 

That is why Jesus says that the Son of Man comes 
'fin an hour ye know not.’' There are some people who 
think that they know better; they can tell you just 
when he is going to come; and if they are not quite 
sure of the day, they are quite sure it will be one of 
these days. They take to the book of Daniel and the 
book of Revelation not common sense and intelli¬ 
gence but a curious kind of mathematics; and though 
this sort of prediction has been made and falsified 
again and again, these good foolish people still keep 
up the old foolish game. “In an hour ye know not,” 
yes, and in a manner ye know not, and from a direc- 


256 


THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 


tion ye know not, and in a garb that ye know not; and 
it is going to take all our wit to recognize this Son of 
Man when he comes. He came once and men did 
not recognize him; I see no reason to suppose that we 
should do any better. In any case the moral is per¬ 
fectly plain —Be ye also ready, with your lamps burn¬ 
ing, with your wits sharpened, with your spirits sen¬ 
sitive, with your eyes alert, with your feet shod, so 
that you may be there when he comes. For he is 
coming —all the time. He may be coming in some final 
way some day; but I know nothing about that. But I 
know that in a very real sense he comes any day, every 
day, to the ready soul, quietly, noiselessly, with an 
imperceptible footfall. Be ye therefore ready! 

O Son of Man, to right my lot 
Naught but thy 'presence can avail; 

Yet on the road thy wheels are not, 

Nor on the sea thy sail. 

My *‘how’* or “when” thou wilt not heed. 

But come down thine own secret stair, 

That thou mayest answer all my need. 

Yea, every bygone prayer. 


“BY ANOTHER WAY” 

It is said in the Gospel that the Wise Men after 
they had been to Bethlehem went back to their 
own country by another way. It is also said in a 
parenthesis that they were warned to do so by a 
dream. But the dream was not necessary. They 
would have done so in any case. Even if they had 
gone back to their own country by the old road 
still it would have been another way. For that is 
precisely the difference which the Manger makes. 

You do not begin to understand the mLeaning of 
the Gospel until you realize that it does not aimi at 
making better mien. It aimis at making different men. 
It does not propose to reform m^en; it sets out to trans¬ 
form them.. Its object is not to imiprove them; it is 
to change them. It does not mean to repair the house, 
but to rebuild it. It does not invite us to turn over a 
new leaf; it bids us start a new book. Its program is 
not to patch up broken-down souls or dilapidated 
characters; it is rather to reconstruct them from the 
bottom up. Its policy is that of making a new world 
by making new mien. 

Of course it uses the old material. You are still 
the same person after you have been through the 
Gospel mill—the sarnie person, the sam.e self, as before, 
but with a difference. I read the other day of a saloon 
which had been turned into a children’s play center; 
the same old building—with a difference. I know of a 


258 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

house which was rebuilt on a different plan, but built 
with the old materials; still the same house—with a 
difference. And the grace of God takes hold of you, 
the old you, with all the old instincts, the old loves, 
hopes, longings, the same old will and reason and feel¬ 
ing, and builds up with them a new thing, a different 
thing. You say I after as you did before—but with a 
difference. “I live,” you say like St. Paul, ''y^t not I.” 
It is as though the house had had a new tenant—“Yet 
not I, but Christ that liveth in me.” It is the supreme 
miracle of this Child that he communicates his own 
quality to those who keep his company—and the 
difference that comes is that you think things with his 
mind, feel things with his heart, see things with his 
eye. You still live in the same world; but it has be¬ 
come different. You go back to your country by 
another way. 

To your own country, you observe—to the place 
which you love most and where you are known best. 
Many men have supposed that in order to live Chris- 
tianly, it is necessary to go somewhere else—to go out 
into the desert or the wilderness or the cloister away 
from the racket of life—but that is a mistake. For the 
truth is that, wherever you go, you take your own world 
with you, and wherever you are, you create your own 
environment. I have known men who had gone wrong 
and got into trouble being sent from home, in the 
fond illusion that they could make a new start if 
only they were sent into a new country. And oc¬ 
casionally a break with old associations has helped to 
set a man on his feet. But that is the exception and 
not the rule. A man who can’t make a new start in 



“BY ANOTHER WAY” 


259 


the place where he is, is incapable of making a new 
start anywhere else. And the reaction of Jesus upon 
men is to send them back to the old job, the old round, 
the old associations, there to live out the new life in 
the common ways. It sends the cobbler back to his 
last, the fisherman back to his nets, the doctor back to 
his consulting room, and the preacher to his pulpit— 
yet all the time with a difference. For the cobbler's 
last becomes an altar, and the fisherman's nets a sacra¬ 
ment, and the doctor's office an oratory. The old 
familiar ways are transfigured by a new light; and 
things that had grown stale through use and dull 
through habit receive a baptism of new life. The 
common dust of life shines like new gold. 

Now, what the Wise Men had found at Bethlehem 
was their true self-hood. They were men who had 
been devoted to knowledge, to the kind of thing that 
passed for science in their day. They came to Beth¬ 
lehem as wise men; they left it as simple men. The 
guiding star had led them back to the source and base 
of life—^to the manger, bed of a new bom Child. And 
there they were disburdened of their vast sophistica¬ 
tions, their ponderous learning, their foolish wisdom; 
and they worshiped the Child. 

They worshiped the Child. Have you ever wor¬ 
shiped a child, any child? If you have not you have 
never yet seen a child. For a child is God's perpetual 
miracle; in a real and true sense, every child that is 
born is an incarnation of God. If you have any genius 
for children at all, you know that you have to be 
transfigured, to become a wholly different person, if 
you are to be of the company. You have to come down 



260 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

from the pedestal of your maturity, to shed your adult 
foolishness, and to be quit of your worldly wisdom, 
your stupid realisms, and to adapt yourself to another 
kind of reality. The man who can genuinely unbend to 
children is not far from the Kingdom of God. Is it 
not written that except we become as little children we 
can not enter into the Kingdom of God at all? Our 
trouble is that, as we grow up, we grow away from the 
bedrock reality; the seen and the tangible crowd into 
our minds and hide the things that are unseen and 
eternal in a darkness that thickens all the time. So 
we have to retrace our steps to our infancy; and that 
is why it is good for our souls to make friends with 
little children. For they help us along, lead us by 
the hand back into the land of the simple heart. 

So the human spirit turns back gratefully to the 
Child of Bethlehem. It recognizes the call of home, 
the real world to which we belong and from which we 
are so far separated. In the miracle of birth, we face 
a mystery that passes our thought; in the innocence of 
the child, we face a wonder which shames our con¬ 
sciences; in the sureness of its intuitions we recognize 
a power of vision which we have lost. We know our¬ 
selves to be face to face with God. We stand on the 
threshold of the Innermost; we recapture our vision 
of Life—and we go back to our own country by another 
way. 

Help us, 0 God, ever to he mindful that not many 
wise, not many mighty, are called, hut that Thou hast 
chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the 
wise, and the weak things of the world to put to shame the 
mighty. Give us the mind of the little child, clean, simple, 



“BY ANOTHER WAY” 


261 


sensitivef that we may not miss Thy word to us; and re¬ 
store to us the lowliness and the purity of heart to which 
the gateway of Thy Kingdom is ever open. Amen, 








SALVE ATQUE VALE 

The Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you. 

When you say good-by to youi friends at a rail¬ 
way station or a dock, how often do you recall that 
you are praying for them? The word has in common 
use lost its religious content, and at best amounts to 
little more than a conventional parting gesture. And, 
by a curious inversion, a word which was meant to 
breathe faith has come to be charged with sadness. 
The same lot has befallen the French word, ‘"adieu;” 
and, though I do not know that the word “farewell’' 
ever had a definitely religious color, it has even more 
than the other two become associated with the sorrow 
of parting. We utter it as though some episode of life 
had reached its term, much as an author writes “finis” 
at the close of the last chapter of his book. But in 
point of fact, both “good-by” and “farewell” speak 
not of the past but of the future. They refer not to 
something ended, but to something begun. 

It would be easy to build upon these reflections 
an argument about the growth of pessimism in modern 
times. Here are words which look to the future with 
faith and hope; and yet they are used merely to round 
off and to give a decent ending to some chapter of life 
that is over and done with. And the argument would 
go on to show that this habit of looking backward, 
even when we use a forward-looking word, was due to 
the decay of religion. If we do not cherish a thought 


264 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

of God, it is not likely that we shall look to the future 
with a strong and joyful expectancy. We shall hope 
for the best, that is all. But while all this might be 
very true (as I think it is), I doubt very much whether 
we are justified in resting the argument upon the 
degradation of the words ''good-by'' and ''adieu” 
What has happened to them is, I fancy, what happens 
to every word in common use. They have become 
worn down and so have become characterless. On my 
desk, as I write, there is a round disc of copper which 
I surmise was once an English halfpenny. But it has 
been in use so long that the images and letter-press 
on it have worn off altogether and it is now quite 
impossible to identify the coin with any assurance. 
And so habit and use have rubbed the thought of God 
off the word "good-by," and what is left of it means 
no more than a wave of the hand, and perhaps a tear. 

All the same, let me insist upon this circumstance, 
that a good deal of the sadness of parting springs 
from a certain decline of religious faith. Some sor¬ 
row for the ending of a happy fellowship, some "sad¬ 
ness of farewell" there must inevitably be. We are 
after all made of flesh and blood; and it would be a bad 
day for us if we ceased to feel the pangs of parting. 
We may, if we will, cultivate and acquire the in¬ 
sensibility of the stoic; but while that might arm us 
against much sorrow, it would also blunt the edge of 
our sensitiveness to joy and happiness. That is surely 
not what we need. It is rather the recovery of our 
faith in God, so that the sense of personal loss may be 
tempered by the assurance of the well-being of our 
beloved; and when that faith is sufficiently vivid, there 


SALVE ATQUE VALE 265 

is also the realization that time and space are at last 
powerless to part those who are united in the love of 
God. 

It is the supreme distinction of Christianity 
that it enables us to overcome even the separation of 
death and to regard the gi’ave not as a blind alley, but 
a passage-way into perfect life. That is what we mean 
when we speak of “the communion of saints”—the 
family of faith is unbroken, undivided, in heaven and 
earth. Bunyan says somewhere that the River of Life 
flows through the King's Country. It does not 
separate the King's Country from this life; it is the 
King's Country on both sides of the river. And that 
is what robs death of its sting and the grave of its 
victory. For the Pagan, death and the grave wore 
an aspect of finality to which one had to submit dumb¬ 
ly. It was the inevitable end. There is an old letter 
extant, recovered from a sand-heap in Czyrhynchus, 
written by an Egyptian woman, in which, after a 
reference to the death of some one, she says, “Neverthe¬ 
less, against such things one can do nothing.'' There 
you have the Pagan helplessness and despair in the 
face of death. There's no help for it; and there is 
nothing more to be said. 0 yes, indeed, thank God, 
there is. I think of St. Paul's drawing near death 
and looking forward to being with Jesus, which, as 
he said, “is very far better.'' And I remember one 
who said “Because I live, ye shall live also.'' But all 
the same, I am sure that we do not live out the logic 
of this hope. It is true that some of us are busily 
engaged nowadays in setting up means of communica¬ 
tion with the departed, but I confess that the results 


266 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

leave me unconvinced—and also bored. And I fancy 
that psychical research has a good long way yet to go 
before it can see through the veil to any purpose. 

Meantime, I would like to suggest that we Prot¬ 
estants do neglect two religious exercises which seem 
to me to be implied in the fact of immortality; and I 
am not sure that our weak hold on immortality does 
not lie at the door of this neglect. Why we neglect 
them I do not quite know. The first is prayer for the 
departed; I do not know of any reason in Scripture 
or philosophy why we should not pray for our beloved 
who are dead, if we are moved to do so. And the other 
is the fact that underlies the Catholic practise of pray¬ 
ing to the saints. For my own part, I am not much 
concerned about saints, as such; but I can not see why 
I should not ask my father to pray for me still, as I 
asked him to pray for me in the days of his flesh, or 
why he should not still care enough for me to pray for 
me before the throne itself. I think that that is in¬ 
volved in the doctrine of the Communion of the 
Saints, and I believe that doctrine. And I believe 
that we can make that doctrine, and the hope of im¬ 
mortality on which it rests, real to ourselves by a 
fellowship of prayer between heaven and earth. 
For, after all, this does no more than affirm our unity 
with one another and with our beloved in God, in whom 
we all live and move and have our being, both here and 
there. 

But I did not mean to digress to the question of 
immortality. What I had in mind was an attempt to 
recapture the religious accent in the word ''good-by'’— 
and more, the specific Christian accent. For us Chris- 


SALVE ATQUE VALE 26T 

tians, the word ^^God^' should not be a vague indefinite 
name for an unknown power outside ourselves. In¬ 
deed, the whole point of Christianity is that it has given 
definite form and shape to our thought of God. I 
quoted a week or two ago Sir James Barrie's sajdng 
that the God that little boys say their prayers to has- 
a face very much like their mother's, and this is really 
only an elementary form of that longing which receives 
its perfect satisfaction in the experience of seeing the 
light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the 
face of Jesus Christ. You remember how David, in 
Browning's poem, says to Saul: 

“O Saul, it shall be a face like my face that shall greet thee, 

A hand like my hand that shall open the door of new life to thee. 
See the Christ stand ...” 

And I suggest to you that when a Christian man says^ 
^'Good-by, God be with you," what he means is, ''The 
grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with you." 

*But, you will ask, what does the Grace of our 
Lord Jesus Christ mean? Perhaps I can answer the 
question best in a somewhat roundabout way. When 
an old Roman was parting from a friend, he used one 
or both of two words, "sa/ve" and ‘‘vale” Now the 
word “vale” means "be well;" it is as literally trans¬ 
lated as possible in our expression "farewell." The 
other word means much the same thing. Literally 
it means "be saved;" and you will observe that it is 
the same word as that which gives us the word "sal¬ 
vation." Now both the Greeks and Latins used this 
word in the general sense of welfare. It is so used in 
the New Testament. When St. Paul says to the 


'268 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

Philippians that some preach the Gospel from envy 
and others from good will, he adds that in either case 
it will turn out to his salvation—by which he means 
his well-being. And when the Philippian jailor in his 
bewilderment cried out, ‘‘What must I do to be 
saved?” he was not at all thinking of salvation in the 
■strict and specific religious sense that we commonly 
give to it. He simply meant, ^‘What on earth shall I 
do?” and St. PauFs answer was, ‘‘Believe in the 
Lord Jesus Christ, and everything will be all right. 
You need be afraid of nothing, now or at any time. 
All will be well.” And whatever difference of emphasis 
there may be in the use of the word salvation, its cen¬ 
tral idea is welfare, well-being. 

But this well-being, of what does it consist? Well, 
of many things—of everything that a man needs to 
live by. But centrally of three things. First of all, 
the sense of security. That was what the Philippian 
jailor was wanting. There was an earthquake on at 
the time and his life was in danger; his prisoners might 
escape and that might cost him his job, and perhaps 
his head. His entire world was tottering round 
about him and in the midst of this confusion, what 
that man wanted most of all was a spot of safety. I 
suppose “safety first” is a natural instinct, though it 
sometimes becomes active too late. But in any case 
there is only one spot of absolute safety in the whole 
wide universe of life. It matters little how sedulously 
you keep guard against the long arm of mischance, 
how you barricade yourself round about against 
accident and calamity, you can reach no safety that is 
invulnerable to the assaults and storms of this ca- 



SALVE ATQUE VALE 269 

pricious world. You can not build yourself a suit of 
perfectly jointless armor, you can find no anchorage 
where you are safe from tempest and shipwreck. 
You must look beyond the shifting sands of time and 
place. '‘He that dwelleth in the secret place of the 
Most High shall abide under the shadow of the Al¬ 
mighty.'^ There and not elsewhere is security. 
For you are never secure until you know that you can 
stand everything that may happen to you; and you 
have that knowledge only when you have a living 
faith in God, when you have committed your life to 
the Everlasting Arms. Have you noticed how per¬ 
sistent in the Bible is this promise of security? “The 
Lord is thy Keeper.” “He shall give his angels 
charge over thee to keep thee in all thy ways.” “He 
that watcheth over Israel shall neither slumber nor 
sleep.” “Yea, though I walk through the valley of 
the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art 
with me.” And then on to the great words of the New 
Testament—“My sheep hear my voice and they 
follow me and I give to them eternal life—and no 
man shall be able to pluck them out of my hand, and 
no one shall be able to pluck them out of my Father's 
hand.” That is the only security that is security, the 
only security that matters. “Thou wilt keep him in 
perfect peace whose mind is stayed upon thee, because' 
he trusteth in thee.” Even though the earth be moved 
and cast into the midst of the sea, though your uni¬ 
verse may be toppling down upon your head in ruin, 
and the bottom seem to be knocked out of your life, 
yet here is a kingdom of peace and security that can 
not be shaken. 


■270 


THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

Second, the sense of freedom. We speak much of 
freedom, and its nature has been often discussed. But 
when we have analyzed its ingredients, one simple fact 
remains—that the strength of bondage lies in fear. 
The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews has a very 
deep word in one place. He speaks of those ^^who 
through fear of death were all their lifetime in bond¬ 
age.” 

No man is wholly free until he is purged of fear. 
And the moment he is free from fear, then no bonds 
can hold him. Slavery was abolished when the slaves 
ceased to be afraid of the consequences of attempted 
escape. Tyranny is broken when men begin to be 
fearless enough to stand up to it. Freedom like secur¬ 
ity comes when you are no longer afraid of what men 
can do to you; and you know that you need not be 
afraid of what God will do. The free man is he who 
can say, 'Tf God be for us, who can be against us?” 
And no matter what outward forms of freedom you 
may enjoy, you are never free until you are free within. 
You are never free in your thought so long as you 
fear the criticism or condemnation of the Orthodox, or 
are afraid of being called a heretic; you are never free 
in your feeling so long as you are afraid of the bugbears 
of conventional propriety and good form; your will 
is never free so long as you live in fear of the arbiters of 
custom and the defenders of the respectable. Mind 
and heart and will are free only when they are grounded 
in God. I remember when I was a very small boy, we 
used to have a sort of informal “big brother” custom. 
I used to go about in much fear and trembling by rea¬ 
son of boys a little bigger than myself. And I think 


SALVE ATQUE VALE 271 

that my first taste of freedom was when the biggest boy 
in the school one happy day constituted himself my 
protector . . . and it seemed as though the gates of 
the whole earth had been flung open and I was free 
to range it at will. Fear had vanished, and when you 
and I have found the “Sovereign Protector, unseen 
yet forever at hand,'' then we have the freedom that 
nothing in earth can take away. 

The third thing is sufficiency, completeness of 
life, the sense of nothing wanting. Here again St. 
Paul helps us: “I have learned in whatsoever state I 
am, therein to be content. I know how to be abased 
and I know how to abound: in everything and in all 
things I have learned the secret both to be filled and 
to be hungry, both to abound and to be in want." 
Which means this—that he was so abundantly supplied 
with resources within, that he was comparatively in¬ 
dependent of material and temporal good. The less 
we have within, the more we want without; the more 
we have within, the less dependent we are on external 
things. And this is why we to-day are so busy with 
the accumulation of things. This has been called an 
acquisitive age and it has grown amazingly in temporal 
riches. But, like the church at Laodicea, it is poor 
within. And these things go together, naturally and 
inevitably. But there is gold tried by fire to be had, 
untried riches which make us indifferent to the 
outward—and these, unlike the outward, can not be 
lost once we have possessed them. It is the preroga¬ 
tive of the soul that is surrendered to Christ that it pos¬ 
sesses these riches in perpetuity. “All things are 
yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas, or the world, 


272 THE PAPERS OF JOHN PERERIN 

or life, or death, or things present, or things to come, all 
are yours; and ye are Christas, and Christ is God^s/^ 
These three things, then, security, liberty, suf¬ 
ficiency, constitute our well-being, our salvation, both 
in this world and in that to come, and, please observe, 
as much in this as in that. And you will also notice 
that they are the gifts specifically promised to those 
who enter in by the gate which is Christ. '‘He shall 
be saved,'' that is, he shall have security; “he shall go 
in and go out," that is, he shall have freedom; “he 
shall find pasture," that is, he shall have sufficiency. 
These are the contents of our well-being; and they come 
to us through the Christ of God. And, as St. Paul 
suggests, they are the gifts of grace, for, as he says, 
“by grace ye are saved." Grace is the total outgoing 
of the love of God toward the infinite and various 
needs of His creatures. And it is the grace of our Lord 
Jesus Christ also, so described, for in him we see its 
characteristic outworking in life. For not only did he 
conspicuously have the security, the freedom, the 
sufficiency of life which the love of God bestows on . 
our precarious, fear-ridden and meager life; but he 
also by his touch communicated these gifts to others, 
and truly does so still. 

So that when a Christian man says “farewell," 
what he means is: May you have security and freedom 
and sufficiency of life; and when he says “good-by," 
he is not only expressing the same wish but also the 
way of its fulfilment, “God be with you," which be¬ 
ing Christianly interpreted is, “The grace of our Lord 
Jesus Christ, which brings security, freedom, fulness, 
be with you." 









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